Possibility of major gov't maniuplation + law change

 Here is an interview with Bert Dohmen and David McAlvany
Bert: Yes, in my book, Prelude to Meltdown, which was written in late 2007, I said that we were going to go into something similar to 1929, or maybe worse, and the first chance of a sustainable bottom, the first chance, is 2017, and that is just going by cycles. After a major credit bubble burst, it usually takes 17 years to get the system back to basics. But I think when you consider what is happening right now in Washington, I think the actual bottom will take much longer to form. Everything that can be done wrong, is being done, in Washington, and I don’t see any chance of that major trend to reverse to the more positive side.
David: I mentioned earlier that we could see the gloves come off, with D.C. treating New York as the scapegoat for many of the misdirected policies that they, actually, have put in play. We did see a change of rules, as you mentioned, right in the middle of the Chrysler unwind, wherein creditors got the short end of the stick. I am reminded of what governments can do when put under extreme duress. It is not something we have seen since perhaps the 1990s, with any great frequency. But capital controls – used to prevent hot money from entering and abruptly leaving a market, or to prevent flight capital in the event of a banking or currency crisis. Sage advice, if you will? What are the probabilities, and are there other, more reasonable means of the government taking the gloves off, so to say? 

Bert:The thing right now is, people have to really consider that the impossible is possible. I was just at a hedge fund conference a few weeks ago. Over 1700 hedge fund guys were there. On the panel was Senator Chris Dodd, and he said that, in 2008, during the crisis, the country was within ten minutes of the government shutting down the banking system. Within ten minutes. I thought that was an incredible statement. These idiots that caused the crisis were ready to shut down and create a real global crisis, by shutting down the banking system. What use would that have been? They would have really compounded their original stupidity by not having recognized what I, and other people, did recognize, one year ahead of time, namely, that we were heading into a major financial crisis.

So, with that kind of thinking, where they would just shut down the entire banking system, good banks and bad banks alike, it means that there is absolutely no limit to what they will do, and that is what I warn people in the futures markets about. They can close down the futures markets in an instant, and they will. My prediction is that sometime over the next five years, they will close down the futures market. Especially people who are invested in gold futures and silver futures, metals futures, they should be aware of this.

This happened one other time, but it wasn’t done by the government, it was done by the exchange, itself. Do you remember Bunker Hunt, the Hunt brother that tried to corner the silver market in 1980? The exchange just said, “Okay, effective tomorrow morning, no new buying will be allowed, only selling will be allowed. If anybody would have said that they would do that one week ahead of that, they would have probably put him away because they would have thought him insane. But the exchange did it, and the exchange got away with it, and of course, that is when silver really plunged. So anything is possible right now. There is absolutely nothing in Washington that is no longer possible. As investors, I think we have to take that into consideration.                            

           here is transcript of the entire interview