If you want to know about the economics of mining gold in the modern day have a look at this: http://www.mining-technology.com/projects/olympic-dam/ This is the sort of mine that will yield the largest amounts of gold/silver piggybacking off the copper and uranium. Mining gold as the sole commodity is costly, mining it as a by-product of copper, well even low grade gold deposits become viable. What I am saying here is that if the copper price tanks then gold production is likely to reduce about a year or so later (as the mining companies scale back). This may be a good thing for gold only miners as the competition from those large suppliers will diminish.
No just dealers that drop their futures hedge with their dropping (sold) stock. And in the middle of the negativity, when price sits on a bottom, they will loadup again, propelling the price a couple dollars up, and we'll see another "what happened".
