Having witnessed and participated in the Texas Two Step in a visit in 1980 to a friend who had moved to Houston a few years earlier with a sidetrip to the famous Gilley’s in Galveston, the dance is basic and simple. The COMEX, gold and silver version while just as basic and simple, is both insidious and devastating. Both metals are rigged and manipulated by the issuance of naked paper contracts to cap and drive down the price. In the case of gold, it has been more of a short term, temporary periodic price cap type of operation. This is especially true in the last three or four years since gold was reclassified by the BIS and IMF as a first tier asset for central banks and sovereigns for the purpose of their monetary reserves.(Basel 3) Silver, on the other hand has no such classification and while sovereigns may have some in their strategic reserves because of it’s industrial and military uses, most refuse to acknowledge such importance to the point of not even including it in their listing of strategically important material’s holdings. The two step comes into play in that while central banks and their merchant and commercial bank proxies will go long gold and allow it to appreciate slowly over time as a store of value, they use that value to finance the very low threshold of margin required to generate huge numbers of naked paper derivative contracts to short silver on the Comex whenever they need to cap a price rise and or drive the price lower to discourage buyers of physical.(part of the reason for the ridiculous levels of the GSR compared to most of history). As a result of them never running out of the financial ammunition to accomplish their scheme, the ONLY way it will ever end is when the Comex runs out of physical silver bullion in it’s warehouses. This would have been an impossibilty in the past but because of rule changes the exchange for physical whereby buyers of long contracts can declare EFP’s and get the physical delivered to them in London. The Comex silver inventories have been diminished dramatically over the last couple of years. This wouldn’t accomplish anything if silver demand wasn’t as large as it has become for solar, EV’s, everything electronic etc. while at the same time mine supply continues to diminish. We may not know when physical supply gets exhausted, but we do know demand can not continue to expand while supply continues to decline and the price because of manipulation and suppression continues to stay at levels that don’t balance out. Skeptics will say it has lasted for 50+ years, why should it not go on for another 50+? The answer is that it has taken that long for both supply to be used up and demand to increase to a level where demand from both industrial and investment has continued to expand. However, just as in the case of gold being affected by the change in Basel 3, silver is being affected by the change in the Comex rule regarding EFP. So we wait and we stack physical while the “Two Step” plays on.