As with any freely traded market, there are times when the really big players have agreed amongst themselves to stabilize price within a narrow range and to spend money placing trades and spreading news whenever there is movement out of their expected range.  There was a period in early 2013 in which the $ printing institutions allegedly worked quite hard to spread any bad news which might depress the bitcoin price hence proving it to be a worthless computer science experiment.  The other thing which they can do is embargo a couple of months of good news in order to hold the price down.  Guess what happens in the end ?

Contrary to capitalist free market theory, what you get in a speculation dominated free market is a price dependent mainly on the sentiment of news in circulation at the traders; nearly nothing to do with production costs and product usefulness.  Try looking up "penny stock tips" or "tulips".

If you can get your boss to pay you a part of your salary in bitcoin, and bill some of his customers in bitcoin, you are doing us all a favour by moving BTC on from being a speculator curiosity, comparable to krugerrand collecting, to being related in price to its intrinsic worth.