Just as the world was breathing a massive and collective sigh of relief that a new bull market in gold and silver had arrived with all the pomp and pageantry of a Royal Wedding, the Barbarians climbed the walls and are now very close to razing the palace, says precious metals expert Michael Ballanger.

Yesterday morning I actually got excited for a split second when the silver price shot northward to $15.85/oz and I almost fired off a tweet (can’t believe I am actually using Twitter) saying that “Silver could easily become the Cartel’s Achilles Heel” because as silver was creeping up, gold was sliding down, so these Criminal Cretins just continued to lean on gold down to $1,235/oz from $1,262/oz and the algo-bots did the rest with silver succumbing to the intervention/manipulation and now sits at $15.37/oz, down $0.23 instead of up $0.20.

The blogosphere has been abuzz since the end of PDAC last Wednesday about the impending “Melt-Up” in gold and silver prices, and when I read the litany of rationale behind the impetus for the move, I thought I was reading an old archive from Harry Schultz in 1976. All of the Keynesian diatribe nonsense that gets shoveled in front of us day in and day out is all designed to deflect attention away from this massive global exercise in currency debasement, and thus far, it has been working. Stocks are at five-week highs and the Dow is again above 17,000 with the S&P 500 sporting a 20-handle while Mario Draghi talks about the European Central Bank buying every listed stock on the European bourses. The policy “errors” coupled with moral hazard has been transformed into policy “madness” and moral “lunacy” as the bankers around the planet scurry about trying anything and everything to avoid the ultimate day of reckoning—sovereign insolvency. So, in order to create an aura of calm and “business as usual,” the first order of execution is always “Take care of that goddam gold market!” so sure enough, after a soft-ish close to the Crimex session, the Globex geek squad decided to play tap dance through the Access Market tulips and added another $10 downside between 1:30 and 4:00 p.m. when the GLD closed for the day.