With gold and silver on the defensive following a dramatic midnight raid on gold prices last week, Mike Gleason reached out to Chris Powell, Secretary Treasurer at the Gold Anti-Trust Action Committee, also known as GATA, to discuss possible gold price manipulation.

Mike Gleason: Several days ago, we had another attack on the gold market – right as it was holding above a critical price support zone. Someone sold several billions of dollars in gold futures contracts during the wee hours of the night immediately before the Chinese trading day began. It happened during a time of low liquidity like it normally does, and it took the price down over $40 in the matter of a few seconds, halting trading twice for a brief period. What are we to make of all this, Chris?

Chris Powell: Well it's pretty depressing for monetary metals investors. On the other hand, I suppose you could see it in a way as progress for the cause because it was the most brazen, obvious, clumsy attack yet, and it has prompted a few people to acknowledge that it was a manipulation.

The problem is the people who are acknowledging that cannot quite bring themselves to question whether the central banks were involved in it. But it was so obvious that even people who are not aligned with the manipulation school are acknowledging that somebody was very heavily trying to drive the price down.

Now I think we've advanced to the point where most market observers will acknowledge that somebody is tampering with the gold market, that it's not a free market, and the question now is really only who's doing it, and perhaps in another few hundred years financial journalism will try to put a critical question to central banks about their own surreptitious trades in the gold market.

Mike Gleason: It certainly seems manipulative, because obviously a legitimate seller would try to sell when there is actual liquidity in the market as to maximize the sale price, and we've seen this sort of thing a number of times going back years now. So it is quite obvious what's happening, and there don't seem to be major investigations into these price raids. It just keeps happening. Why don't we see government authorities or large investors crying foul?