>>60936713
>If the price of silver has been artifically lowered this whole time
The price of silver has been kept low primarily by discouraging investors by keeping the price painfully volatile. By reducing investor demand to almost zero, demand for silver is reduced.
China is doing something similar, btw, to help keep the price low. Chinese citizens ARE NOT ALLOWED TO BUY SILVER BULLION, because the Chinese government and industry want to buy the metal for as low a price as possible. Eventually the Chinese government will allow the people to buy silver.
To recap, the American price suppression worked by making silver unattractive by artificially increasing downside volatility to discourage institutional investors, not by directly controlling the market price.
You see the manipulation today where just before COMEX opens, in after market trading, someone would sell massive amounts of silver short into the market to establish downward momentum, triggering the automated stop loss limits when the COMEX opened. They used to do even worse tricks known as "spoofing" where a large sell order is placed to drop the price, then cancelled before anyone could buy at the low price.
None of these tricks work once there is no available silver for sale left in the COMEX/LBMA vaults. The price of silver could jump 10 dollars in one day.