23. The Ambitious Plan to Control the World’s Stock of This Precious Metal
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. (1889 – 1974) was one the richest men on Earth, with a lock on much of the East Texas Oil Field, one of the world’s biggest oil deposits. His sons Nelson, William, and Lamar – the last a founder of the American Football League and Major League Soccer – were also super-rich. Especially Nelson Bunker Hunt, whose Libyan oil exploration and development made him even more fabulously wealthy. However, Nelson became a crackpot and feared that the US government planned to steal his wealth. So to protect his fortune, he decided to buy a whole lot of silver, and hoard it in Switzerland. Then he decided to buy all the silver.
Nelson Hunt eventually persuaded his siblings to join him in a bid to corner the global market on the precious metal. The Hunt brothers went on a silver buying spree in the 1970s. When they ran out of money, they borrowed heavily to buy more silver. By 1979, they had accumulated about 100 million troy ounces – almost 7 million pounds – of the stuff. That was almost half the world’s transportable supply of silver. Then, as seen below, they discovered that they had made a bad miscalculation.