John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.
Bubble Bubble Report’s Jesse Colombo just weighed in on the “Why isn’t silver $100!?” debate with a compelling case for manipulation. Here’s an excerpt:
Many precious metals investors have heard about silver manipulation or suspected it, but few fully understand how it works or can clearly explain it. Many also intuitively sense that silver’s price is artificially low and should be much higher but struggle to identify what—or who—is keeping it suppressed. I have committed myself to studying silver price manipulation, documenting the evidence, educating others, and exposing these practices to bring them to an end and ensure justice is served. In this article, I will explain in clear and accessible terms how silver’s price is systematically manipulated and suppressed.
Simply put, the goal of silver price manipulation is to keep silver’s price artificially low as well as prevent it from breaking above key technical levels that could trigger a full-blown bull market. According to consensus within the precious metals community, the primary culprits behind silver price manipulation are the bullion banks—the most influential players in the precious metals market. These include major financial institutions such as JPMorgan Chase, UBS, HSBC, and Goldman Sachs, several of which have been found guilty of manipulating precious metals markets—particularly gold and silver.
The LBMA’s office in the heart of the City of London. Source: lbma.org.uk.
Bullion banks are typically members of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA), the leading authority overseeing the global over-the-counter (OTC) precious metals market. As LBMA members, these banks play a central role in the market by acting as market makers, facilitating large trades, managing vaulting and storage, and participating in price-setting mechanisms such as the daily London Gold and Silver Fix. This dominant position allows them to exert significant influence over silver prices, making manipulation not just possible, but systemic.
The most common, obvious, and widespread form of silver manipulation is price slams—also known as “tamps”—which almost exclusively take place during the New York COMEX trading session between 8:30 and 11 AM EST. As I’ll explain in greater detail shortly, these slams occur on a high percentage of mornings, but they become even more frequent and aggressive when silver is attempting to break above a key technical or psychological level.
When silver approaches a breakout point that could trigger a snowball effect of additional buying, bullion banks step in to drop the hammer, forcefully slamming the price back down below that level. This calculated suppression is designed to demoralize existing silver investors, discourage new participants, and ensure that silver’s price languishes, preventing momentum from building in its favor.
Silver’s price action over the past year serves as a textbook example of how silver tamping works. As the chart below illustrates, silver has repeatedly attempted to break above the $32–$33 resistance zone, only to be slammed back down each time—except for the current breakout attempt (the outcome of which remains uncertain).
Notably, these persistent price slams have kept silver stagnant, even as gold has surged by approximately $1,000 per ounce to $3,000—a powerful 50% bull market rally that, under normal conditions, would have pulled silver higher due to their historically strong price relationship. However, bullion banks have gone to extraordinary lengths to prevent silver from following its sibling, gold.
To see what one of these slams or tamps looks like on an intraday chart, let’s examine a particularly egregious example from Friday morning, February 14th. While the daily chart above provides a broader view of the price action, the intraday chart below captures exactly how it unfolded that morning. Bullion banks rely on the assumption that most people won’t scrutinize their tactics too closely—but that’s exactly what we’re going to do here.
Some of the most aggressive slams tend to occur on Friday mornings during the U.S. trading session. With the Asian and European markets closed, trading volume and liquidity are significantly lower, creating the perfect conditions for bullion banks to manipulate silver’s price with minimal resistance. This lack of market depth allows them to maximize their impact, giving them more “bang for their buck” when executing price suppression tactics.
As you can see from the 5-minute intraday chart, silver staged a powerful breakout, surging $1 per ounce (3%) during the Asian and European trading sessions. This rally pushed silver above the key $33 resistance level, which had acted as a ceiling for much of the past year, sparking excitement within the precious metals community as many believed silver was finally taking off.
However, around 9 AM New York time, as the U.S. trading session got underway, a massive flood of “paper” silver—in the form of futures contracts—was suddenly dumped onto the market. This deliberate maneuver drove silver back below the critical $33 level, halting the breakout in its tracks and demoralizing silver investors once again.
Note that the silver dumped onto the market was “paper” silver—futures contracts largely unbacked by physical metal. This is the primary way bullion banks artificially suppress silver’s price, keeping it well below where it should be based on true supply and demand for physical silver. What’s both infuriating and disheartening is that this manipulative pattern has persisted almost daily for decades, consistently driving prices downward—never upward.
The chart below shows another egregious example of the manipulation slam pattern, captured on the intraday silver futures chart from late October to early November. During this period, silver made a strong breakout attempt, reaching as high as $35 per ounce, only to be aggressively slammed lower nearly every morning between 8:30 AM and 11:00 AM EST. The heavy selling pressure during the U.S. trading session repeatedly drove silver’s price back down, putting the kibosh on the widely watched late October breakout attempt.
These manipulation slams almost exclusively occur in the morning and rarely at any other time of the trading day. To me, these are unmistakable fingerprints of bullion banks deliberately suppressing silver’s price. This is anything but an organic or natural market.
And sure enough, at the time of writing on March 19, 2025, silver has been slammed in all four of the last four trading sessions, proving that this manipulation pattern remains alive and well:
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