by Jeff Nielson, Sprott Money:

What can be said about precious metals markets in 2017? Gold and silver prices slid through most of the final four months of 2016, virtually wiping out all of the gains of the year.

Regular readers were told that this was going to happen. It was “the Fake Rally” which was the subject of several 2016 commentaries. Readers were also told to expect a “crash”, both in the broader markets as well as precious metals.

This is the agenda of the banking crime syndicate known as the One Bank . This crime syndicate encompasses virtually all of the Big Banks of the Western world, as laid out in the computer model of a trio of Swiss academics, first presented in an article in Forbes magazine .

Via manipulative, computerized trading algorithms (so-called “HFT trading”) the One Bank is able to march markets higher and lower just as easily as a puppet master maneuvers a marionette. So where is the crash in precious metals? Where is the crash in the broader markets?

It’s coming. The fact that equity markets (mostly U.S. equity markets) have been marched higher to even more absurd valuations does not mean there will be no crash. Rather, it simply means that when the bubbles are detonated, the ensuing crash will be even deeper and more violent. This must be true, for several reasons.

In the simplest terms, there is very little profit for the banking crime syndicate in continuing to prop up these bubble markets, let alone push them even higher. It takes an increasingly greater percentage of the One Bank’s time and energy just to maintain these perverted valuations in (Western) equities and (Western) bond markets.

This leaves a proportionately smaller share of time and resources to devote to the One Bank’s favorite activities: scamming and stealing. It would (will) be much easier for the banking crime syndicate to profit from staging yet another crash than to expand the bubbles to even more obscene proportions.

There are three hugely important reasons why down must be the principal direction for our markets going forward.

With valuations in bond/equity markets at such ridiculously elevated levels – simultaneously – it requires much less energy to pull markets down than to push them up. This means greater profits from going short versus going long given the same amount of energy.

Because it is the banking crime syndicate which drives our markets with its manipulative trading algorithm, the One Bank always gets to place its (huge) bets first, any time a change of direction is scripted.

86-year-old long-term ‘investor’ Warren Buffett is sitting with $85 billion in cash for a reason.

This is why we have these regular bubble-and-crash cycles. In a normal world, with legitimate markets, those markets would tend to mostly drift sideways, only occasionally surging up or down in response to some temporary or permanent change in the economy at the macro level. But there is very little profit for criminals to make in such markets.

It doesn’t matter if you get to place your (crooked) bets first in markets which go sideways. You can’t scam people for much when prices don’t change dramatically. Legitimate markets are simply “bad for business”.

The Next Crash will arrive, sooner rather than later, because it must arrive. Gold and silver must go down before they can go up (much higher). For precious metals bulls who refuse to accept this logic, ask yourselves this: what is going to drive these markets higher if they are not first pushed down to utterly ridiculous levels?

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