Fiscal conservatives have been the primary buyers of Gold iin recent years. Many of those same affluent conservatives either supported or were recently elected to the House of Representatives.
Because gold is, in theory, a hedge against Hyperinflation, it is possible that if the United States defaults on its debt, the value of gold will increase dramatically; so these conservatives stand to make a killing.
If the United States remains solvent, the price of gold will go down and a lot of fiscal conservatives stand to loose a lot of money.
It’s also conceivable that a good advertising campaign by gold producers could be enough to move the price of gold. Imagine that an effective, sustained advertising campaign, targeted at wealthy, conservative individuals in the US, is able to persuade 25,000 of them per month to switch a portion of their financial assets into gold. (Note that the target audience would be those roughly 3 million US households that have over $1 million in financial assets.) Suppose for the sake of argument that each of them is persuaded to shift just 5%, or $50,000, of their portfolio into gold. Such an advertising campaign would have the effect of pushing $15 bn per year into the market for investment gold — very possibly enough to have a significant impact on the price of gold, given how small the overall market for gold is.
Note that a very similar thing happened to the market for diamonds in the middle of the 20th century. The DeBeers diamond cartel used an incredibly successful advertising campaign in the 1950s to cement the idea of the diamond as the premier gemstone, and in so doing permanently changed the value of diamonds.
Quotes from:
Street Light blog
Paul Krugman blog - The Glenn Beck / DeBeers Connection
In addition these almost-all-white conservatives get an added bonus if the US becomes insolvent: they make a black Democratic President look bad (fail) and they then probably regain power.
So, are the motives of these rich, right-wing politicians un-american, or just a conflict of interest ?