It used to be when there was a big question “Out There”waiting for an answer, the usual line was, it was the $64,000 question, referrencing the ill fated, late 1950’s game show of the same name, that got taken off the air  for allegedly being rigged by providing contestants with the answers ahead of time. Well, the question of the hour, day(and last fifty years) is whether the banker manipulation of gold and silver is over? Adjusting for inflation and the size of the short silver position, $64,000 just isn’t going to cut it, therefore The Trillion!  We know from the great work of Ted Butler, that JP Morgan was the big silver short for a long period of time before exiting that role after numerous criminal settlements similiar in nature, but not for that specific offense. During that time they accumulated approx. a billion ounces of physical silver. Butler has stated that the role of the major silver manipulator, ie price suppressor, has since been taken over by Bank Of America. We won’t know whether they will continue to suppress the price, just slow down the inevitable rise, or have or will soon exit their short silver position. One could speculate that the recently engineered price smash in silver would have been the ideal time to do so. I would suggest that while one might think so, it wouldn’t have been quite that easy to just buy back the shorted futures contracts on the way down. If they did, the buying would have stopped the decline and actually reversed it. The more likely way to exit a large futures short position without affecting the falling price as quickly and directly as covering those shorts by buying back the futures, would have been to slowly buy way out of the money call options on silver, at prices significantly higher than current spot. If they bought at least enough calls to offset their short futures position(probably bought an even larger number of calls) they could sit back, stop suppressing the price, by no longer selling any additional futures contracts short, and just let silver rocket to much higher prices. At some point the silver price will reach to and above the price of their long calls. They can sell everything out or more likely use most of the calls to close out the shorts on the futures contracts and if they bought enough calls, have a huge profit on the rest. The price action in silver in the weeks and months to come will give us clues as to whether the game has changed and that is what will transpire, or if it turns out to be “same as it ever was” and the manipulation and suppression scheme resumes, after this rally runs out of steam. I believe it will be the former, but will be watching to see if we go back to business as usual.