COMEX is a paper pricing mechanism.  To prove this to yourself, watch its daily inventory which rarely changes with any significance.  It is not where world production trades and is not the real price of precious metals.  To start understanding the real prices, go to these links:

Gold:  http://tinyurl.com/GoldPrice

Silver:  http://tinyurl.com/SilverPrice

I believe these were first posted at Le Metropole Cafe (GATA), sorry if they have already been posted here.  The sites are a daily update on all gold and silver bullion coin prices from eBay.  Look at the listings for Kruggerands for a world-wide bullion price.

These prices for gold and silver are also not the real price of these metals.  Think about ‘price’ this way…in Prohibition era, the mob in Chicago controlled the sale of alcohol.  The price was whatever the mob said it was.  The mob was the PTB.  There were also moonshiners, small time operators, producing and selling alcohol. This was good for everyone including the mob.  It drew attention to those small guys who were easy prey for the gov’t to harrass, made the gov’t look good like it was actually enforcing the law (think SEC and Martha S and Mark Cuban) and the gov’t, the mob and all the boozers were happy.  In the same way today, the PTB allow small gold coins to trade, they mint a few and sell them into the market, and control the public price of the metal via COMEX.  But, something’s gone wrong and we’re starting to see evidence that the mob is losing control of the pricing in the non-public market.