Wednesday, October 22, 2014

The Man Who Tried to Corner the Silver Market, Nelson Bunker Hunt, is Dead

Nelson Bunker Hunt, an heir to the oil billionaire H. L. Hunt fortune, is dead. He was 88.

Bunker Hunt and his brothers, Herbert and Lamar, once tried to corner the silver market. Their buying drove the price of silver to $50.35 an ounce. BUT, the problem was that they didn't watch the money supply!

Paul Volcker had taken the reigns at the Fed and he had stopped the crazed money printing of his predecessor G. William Miller.

With new Fed money no longer flowing into the markets, there was no way the price of silver was going to stay at the then lofty levels. It crashed to $10.80 per ounce.

With the dramatic crash in the price of silver, the Hunts faced billions of dollars in margin calls that they couldn't meet. I was actually sitting in the brokerage office of a senior vice-president at one firm on Wall Street, as he wrote out the tickets to sell out the Hunts when they couldn't meet the margin calls  by his firm.

The Great Silver Crash:


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