> Precious metals markets have long since been subject to manipulation by large banks. Several banks have admitted wrongdoing and faced fines for manipulating gold prices. Many believe that the prices of gold and silver have been kept artificially low through the use of leveraged paper contracts.

>Dr. Paul Craig Roberts, the former economic advisor for the Reagan administration, has written extensively about this subject.

>In his view, some of the biggest banks in the world have been working to suppress the price of gold in Western markets for many years. They accomplish this through creating so-called “naked shorts” out of thin air (the term vapor contract term we’ve been using is analogous to a naked short).

>A naked short is simply a contract that allows an institution to place a sell order for a particular asset without having any ownership of the asset.

>In other words, it allows a bank to flood the market with fake sell orders, creating downward market pressure. Given that banks can create these shorts to the moon without any accountability, they can keep the price down at a level more or less of their choosing for quite some time.

Especially the last alinea seems to reflect some of the things you said about Tether actually.