You know you have price-fixing when something is "falling in value" yet nobody wants to sell it (and everybody wants to buy it). In other words, when you have shortages, you probably have price-fixing.
It's huge banks selling electronic (paper) silver that is bringing the price of things like silver/gold down right now. It's not "the man on the street" or even investors. Because those guys are doing nothing but BUYING.
PHYSICAL SILVER IS VIRTUALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO ACQUIRE right
now, for love or money, unless you don't mind paying
really stupid prices....I mean WAY over Spot....
Today, for example, on my COINNET dealer trading network,
I saw a tranch of 100-oz. J/M Bars SELL quickly when
offered at $17.80/oz. -- that was $.60 over Spot at the
time, for a dealer-to-dealer price....and there were
MANY bidders for bars at + $.50-$.55 over spot, too...
A small lot of 100 pcs. of 2008 Silver Eagles [ which
may become the lowest mintage issue of all thanks to
the Mint's non-production currently!] was offered at
$21.25/each -- that's $4.00 each OVER SPOT -- and was
sold immediately to some desperate buyer apparently!
sheesh....
There are 30-35 BUY messages on the sytem to every SELL
message, but most of the SELL messages are for 90% Silver
Coins, NOT pure silver bars or rounds, either...
IF we get lucky and drift into a "trading range" or a
sideways chop for 4-8 weeks, THEN, hopefully more product
will come onto the markets and these absurd PREMIUMS
will come back into some semblance of normalcy....tho
I doubt we'll see any + $.35 over cheap pure silver for
a long while.....it's just drying up.....