Precious Metals Manipulation & Physical Investment

The US Justice Department has begun to investigate whether 10 of the world’s largest banks have manipulated gold and silver prices. The Justice Department is just the latest in a series of financial regulators to investigate possibilities of precious metals manipulation, including the UK Financial Conduct Authority, Germany’s BaFin, and Switzerland’s competition commission WEKO. On top of that, there are a number of pending civil lawsuits in New York against some of these same banks for gold price rigging.

What should physical gold and silver investors take away from this news?

First, the allegations seem to be over short-term manipulation of gold and silver prices. For instance, take the 2012 case against Barclays for failing to prevent one of its traders from manipulating the gold price. In this situation, it was a single Barclays trader who “fixed the price in order to avoid the payment of $3.9 million to a customer under an option, which boosted his own trading book by $1.75 million.”

The client was compensated, and Barclays was fined. The media focuses on this judgment as a reason for why further manipulation investigations are warranted. But remember – this case transpired on a single day in order to fool one investor who was transacting millions of dollars worth of gold.

Physical precious metals investors should not take this as a cue to run from the market. Gold and silver bullion should be long-term investments in your portfolio. The fundamental reasoning for an ongoing bull market in precious metals does not fall apart because some bankers may have temporarily rigged the price on a single day to boost their trading books.

These sorts of financial hijinks cannot halt the devaluation of paper money by central banks around the world. Negative and zero-percent interest rate policies combined with massive money-printing in nearly every developed nation may destroy the value of currencies and eventually trigger inflation. In such an environment, precious metals remain one of the few safe-haven assets for protecting your purchasing power, regardless of their short-term, day-to-day price.

If anything, these investigations and the recent overhaul of the London Gold and Silver Fixes are only making the precious metals market more transparent. This might mean additional gains for physical investors who bought gold earlier, but shouldn’t dissuade investors from buying into the market today. More importantly, it may even expand investor demand for precious metals as they gain confidence in the security of the market.

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