Despite a sharply rising US$ all through Far East, Europe and the Comex open…gold managed to stay within five dollars of its Friday closing price in New York. Gold and silver’s prices peaked at 9:00 a.m. in New York…when both had managed to claw their way into positive territory for the day. But once the London fix was in at 10:00 a.m. in New York, the rug got pulled out from under them.

As per usual, either [or both] JPMorgan (NYSE:JPM) and HSBC USA (NYSE:HBC) should be considered prime suspects.

click to enlarge

Both the gold [above] and silver [below] charts show where they pulled their bids on three separate occasions during the day, and whatever sellers there were…were forced to sell into a vacuum. It’s the ’same old, same old’.

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Alex’s Notes: I predicted this on June 4th. last summer.

Hold on to your seats, because if they follow through on the rhetoric, gold is a moonshot.

China can buy more gold, oil with forex -official

2009-03-09 05:52 (UTC)

BEIJING, March 9 (Reuters) - China should use part of its nearly $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves to buy more gold, oil, uranium and other strategic commodities, the head of China’s energy bureau said in comments published on Monday.

The comments made by Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, marked the latest call out of Beijing that the government should diversify the world’s largest stockpile of forex reserves.

Zhang’s proposals were published by the Beijing-based China Reform Daily, a newspaper run by China’s powerful economic planning agency, the National Development and

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pJan 5, 2009 (WALL STREET JOURNAL) -- As the U.S. seeks to stockpile oil, China has been doing the same, observers say, and is expected to quicken the pace -- a development that already may be helping to boost oil prices./ppOn Friday, the U.S. Department of Energy said that amid low oil prices, it aims to fill the country's Strategic Petroleum Reserve to capacity this year./ppThat news followed a rare public statement last week from China's top energy official, Zhang Guobao, head of the National Energy Administration, in the People's Daily newspaper that China should take advantage of the falling global energy demand to increase its oil reserves. Mr Zhang said China will quot;encourage companies to utilize idle storage capacity to increase inventories.quot;/ppOil prices have been rising lately. On Friday, oil closed up 3.9% to $46.34 a barrel on the New York Mercantile Exchange./ppThough China doesn't disclose its oil inventories ...