Price Manipulation in the Precious Metals Markets?

The Economic Collapse blog has just posted an article reporting manipulation in the prices of silver and gold.  The article also hints at corruption in the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (where Brooksley Born,  who tried to sound the alarm about unregulated derivatives trading, used to work).  Here is a stunning quote from the article:

When people think they are buying "gold", they are actually just buying pieces of paper that say they own gold.

In fact, during the CFTC hearings, Jeffrey Christian of CPM Group confirmed that the LBMA banks actually have approximately a hundred times more gold deposits than actual gold bullion.

Uh oh.

So what happens if everyone decides that they want actual physical delivery of their gold?

It would be such a mess that it is painful even to think about it.

The truth is that right now most of the trading activities on the London exchange are just paper for paper.

But people get into gold because they want to be in a real commodity.

In fact, there are thousands of clients around the globe who think they own huge deposits of gold bullion, and are being charged large storage fees on that imaginary bullion, but what they really own are a bunch of pieces of paper.

This almost reminds me of the housing bubble crisis.  I have seen many ads peddling gold to the masses on television and wondered exactly who was making the money off of these sales.  I suspect that the people purchasing the gold are the ones being fleeced.  Of course, this is just one more example of our federal government's failure to properly regulate economic activity.