Yes, Gold Is Being Manipulated. But to What Extent?

Gold is being suppressed but to what extent

Another day, another banking scandal.

Last week the European Commission announced that it’s fining five big banks for rigging the international foreign exchange (forex) market. As many as 11 world currencies—including the euro, British pound, Japanese yen and U.S. dollar—were allegedly manipulated by traders working at Barclays, the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), Citigroup, JPMorgan and Japan’s MUFG Bank.

Altogether, the fines come out to a whopping 1.07 billion euros ($1.2 billion).

According to the press release dated May 16, the infringements took place between December 2007 and January 2013. Traders working on behalf of the offending banks secretly shared sensitive trading information. This enabled the traders—who were direct competitors—to “make informed market decisions on whether to sell or buy the currencies they had in their portfolios and when.”

Financial services is already the least trusted sector among seven others worldwide, according to the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer. News of the coordinated forex rigging—which follows other high-profile scandals such as the Libor scandal, Wells Fargo fake account scandal, gold fixing scandal (which I’ll get to later), among many more—is unlikely to improve public sentiment.

As I’ve said before, I believe that strong distrust in traditional financial services, especially among millennials, greatly contributed to early bitcoin adoption. With bitcoin, there’s no third-party risk. Transactions are peer-to-peer. Users of the digital coin find this sort of freedom very attractive, and because it’s built on top of blockchain technology, price manipulation is much more difficult to pull off.