As we head towards Monday morning, here are three very simple financial market facts from last Friday.

On hearing the US payroll results, Sterling strengthened by nearly 2% against the Dollar. That is sort of logical, except that (a) the numbers weren’t that bad and (b) the rise took place throughout the day.

The minute the New York Exchange opened, gold fell $30 and pretty much retained that position throughout the day. That’s the opposite of what you’d expect from disappointing payroll numbers. But given it began long before the numbers were known officially, the two things are technically unrelated. Allegedly.

The oil price spiked up. There was not one single sign from around the world that would suggest to anyone but a lunatic that oil’s price should rise – but it did.

Now as we’ve become all too aware over the last year, these three sectors – currency, gold and commodities – are being directionalised all the time. Only central banks and major hedge funds have the clout to pull off this kind of stuff. What interests me in this instance is whether the two might be working in concert.

That’s the kind of thought I’d have dismissed as whacknut conspiracy drivel five years ago. But in the light of QE, Zirp, Libor, gold, and covert EU money-printing scandals, today I’m willing to consider almost anything.

Sovereign banks and their satellites are desperate to sh0re themselves up against the inevitable bad bets and bad debts that will emerge once the bourse-pumping can no longer be maintained. I remain convinced that the main and most direct means of doing this is first the purchase of gold at an artificially low price….and then its arbitrary revaluation to a far higher price once they have the stocks they need. As the French and Indian bans on gold sales showed last week, they will pull any stunt necessary to ace out anyone and anything getting in the way of this.

But what I’m beginning to wonder is whether Government agencies and hedge funds are joining forces to mutual advantage, with the aim of creating a treasure chest of short-term investment monies. The motives would obviously be, respectively, funding gold purchase, and enhancing client profit: the point of acting together is to create bigger (and thus more convincing) market movements that sucker in bigger and bigger amounts of money.

This isn’t quite as fanciful as you’d think: almost every central bank in the world now outside China is packed with former senior fund managers and bank executives in general, and Goldman Sachs illuminati in particular. And the arrangement is mutually beneficial: the Sovereigns drive down the cost of gold, while the funds get to profit from mega-scale bets that are all racing certainties. All such a conglomerate would have to do is skip around the globe to variously ‘salt’ buying of the Yen, selling of gold, buying of oil, selling of Dollars and buying of Sterling in sufficient volumes….and then do the opposite when the saps jump in or out.

The immediate goal of all gains made by Sovereign bankers is to buy gold and Dollars at their low points, and sell oil at the peak. All the hedge funds ask is to be told when to pile in or get out. The win-win nature of this for both partners is blindingly obvious. Certainly, it makes far more sense of the bizarre movements we saw in the markets last Friday than any traditional analysis could.

It will be interesting this coming week to observe whether gold is driven down any further: I think it will be. What might be very instructive is to keep a close eye on the gold positions taken by the major hedge fund players in readiness for that.