“The government is the potent omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. 

To declare that the end justifies the means — to declare that the government may commit crimes — would bring terrible retribution.”

Louis D. Brandeis

I was curious to see what the big price smackdown had done at The Bucket Shop relative to the ‘claims per ounce' in the precious metals. 

I will be checking again tomorrow to see what the little extra kick we saw this morning might have accomplished.

In summary in silver the ‘claims per ounce' actually rose a bit. This is not surprising so much because this is an active month for silver, and it clings stubbornly, almost as if by its fingertips, to the $15 handle.

Gold was as you know hit harder, being smacked down by an avalanche of futures contract selling into one of the quietest periods of the overnight trade.

The open interest actually declined a bit, but significant amount of new gold for delivery appeared, so the ‘claims per ounce' as I prefer to call it dropped only to about 97:1. 

They did, however, break the uptrend which had been driving towards 100:1.

Have you ever heard the little told story about the great bull market of the 1920's, and a little known ‘publicist,' which is a five dollar word for a simple ‘bagman' named A. Newton Plummer.

‘An investigation later discovered that business journalists for at least eight papers promoted stocks in their writing in return for bribes. The most embarrassing were at the Wall Street Journal, where reporters who wrote “Broad Street Gossip” and “Abreast of the Market” took payoffs for stock tips in the 1920s. 

The revelations about the Journal reporters came out during hearings by the Senate Banking and Currency Committee in 1932, more than three years later, when Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia produced cancelled checks written to the Journal reporters from publicist A. Newton Plummer. The stories based on the bribes had gone as far back as 1923. The Journal ran the story about the testimony before the committee on page 11 the next day.

University of North Carolina, History of Business Journalism