Perusing various commentary the last two days regarding the Sunday night smackdown of the metals focused on two aspects. One pretty much widely discussed, the other, I only saw the tie in mentioned once and that After the fact. The widely discussed aspect was the deliberate selling of huge amounts of futures contracts Sunday night to smash gold and silver prices. We have seen that before. The answer to the question of why now, is two fold. Late last week both gold and  silver were setting up for a breakout. Silver especially, when it was trading just over 26 early Wed. was on the verge of a major breakout before starting to selloff. The tie in of why Sunday night appears to be, not only will our CPI and PPI reports be coming out this week, (which the gov’t can pretty much massage to whatever they want in any given month) BUT the Chinese were releasing their inflation numbers, which came in at 9%. Without the Sunday night smash, that could have been a catalyst for a major rally in commodities, particularly gold and silver. There is always a reason for why something happens When it does, it just isn’t always clear at the time it is happening!  The damage has been done and it looks like even more patience will be needed before gold and silver get back on track.