The Financial Post reports in its Thursday edition that gold bugs have long predicted bullion would reach around $5,000 per ounce, and now that it is here, some claim it should be even higher due to alleged manipulation by big banks and Western governments. The Post's Gabriel Friedman writes that others write this off as a nonsense conspiracy theory. But with gold prices swinging wildly, the decades-old debate about what makes gold rise or fall is rearing its head again. Gold bug Eric Sprott calls major American banks, and Canadian ones too, a "cartel." He says gold is "kind of their whipping boy." The banks, he says, manipulated gold futures. Such trades can be settled in one of two ways. One is to deliver physical gold on the agreed-upon day; the other is to make a cash payment based on the difference between the contracted price of gold and the spot price on delivery day. In practice, gold bugs say traders at the big banks figured out a way to game the system. They would short gold or bet on gold futures below the spot price. By executing this strategy at a large scale, they affected market sentiment, and eventually the large number of low-priced gold futures would drag down the spot price of gold.