GOLD AND SILVER ARE SELLING OFF! Vicious Gold Slamdown Breaks Gold Market For 20 Seconds. Gold Futures Halted at 2:54am

Gold continues to move further and further away from the peak it made August 28 following the latest rally in the shiny yellow metal.
This morning, it’s down 2.1%, trading right around $1335 an ounce. Earlier, it fell as low as $1331.90 (around 8:30 AM ET).
On Tuesday, Société Générale commodities strategists, who have been bearish on gold all year, declared that the “gold bounce is over,” and advised clients to “sell gold with a $1200 target.”
The strategists outlined a few bearish arguments against the metal:

A US military strike now looks much less likely with Syria having accepted Russia’s proposal for Syria’s chemical weapons to be given up for UN control.

Read more: http://www.businessinsider.com/gold-is-getting-slammed-2013-9#ixzz2egdeMxH8
Its a practice known as taking out the bid stack. Done here at 3 am when the volume is low.
There was a time when, if selling a sizable amount of a security, one tried to get the best execution price and not alert the buyers comprising the bid stack that there is (substantial) volume for sale. Of course, there was and always has been a time when one tried to manipulate prices by slamming the bid until it was fully taken out, usually just before close of trading, an illegal practice known as “banging the close.” It appears that when it comes to gold, the former is long gone history, and the latter is perfectly legal. As the two charts below from Nanex demonstrate, overnight just before 3 am Eastern, a block of just 2000 GC gold futures contracts slammed the price of gold, on no news as usual, sending it lower by $10/oz. However, that is not new: such slamdowns happen every day in the gold market, and the CFTC constantly turns a blind eye. What was different about last night’s slam however, is that this time whoever was doing the forced, manipulation selling, just happened to also break the market. Indeed:following the hit, the entire gold market was NASDARKed for 20 seconds after a circuit breaker halted trading!
To summarize: a humble block of 2000 gold futs (GC) taking out the bid stack, and slamming the price of gold, managed to halt the gold market: one of the largest “asset” markets in the world in terms of total notional, for 20 seconds.
Here is Exhibit A of either market manipulation or yet another broken market from Nanex:
December 2013 Gold (GC) Futures Depth of Book 


http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-12/vicious-gold-slamdown-breaks-gold-market-20-seconds
http://www.nanex.net/aqck2/4420.html