WILLIAM HERBERT HUNT (1929-2024)

All three were sons of H.L. Hunt, a Texas oilman who turned poker winnings into one of the world's largest fortunes, a bigamist who taught his many children to be skeptical of the government and its paper money. And they all bought silver—lots of silver—which landed them at the center of the biggest commodities-trading scandal of the 20th century.

Bunker and Herbert, the primary drivers of what became known as a scheme to corner the silver market, started buying the precious metal in the early 1970s when the price hovered around $1.50 an ounce. In 1980, when it was trading around $50 and they controlled more than 100 million ounces, they were looking at profits in the billions.

But before the end of the year, they were hocking everything: horses, coins, land and lawn mowers. And by the end of the decade, they were bankrupt, the subjects of federal investigations, banned from trading commodities and the inspiration for an Eddie Murphy movie, Trading Places.

As Herbert Hunt—the last survivor of the three, who died April 9 at the age of 95—put it in a call to the Commodity Futures Trading Commission on what became known as Silver Thursday: I'm busted.

William Herbert Hunt was born in El Dorado, Ark., on March 6, 1929, to H.L. and Lyda Hunt. The family eventually settled in Dallas. There were six children in the family, including two sisters, Caroline and Margaret, and the oldest brother, Hassie.

Growing up rich didn't deprive Herbert of an entrepreneurial instinct. He studied geology at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., where he used his gin-rummy winnings to buy the lease on a Sinclair gas station, which he ran as a student.

After college, Herbert went into the oil-and-gas business, the industry that would consume most of his career. He was particularly close to his brother, born Nelson Bunker Hunt. For years, the two worked out of side-by-side offices in Dallas where Herbert employed a fiercely religious secretary who was known to proselytize to callers when her boss put them on hold.

Herbert Hunt maintained a modest profile for someone of his largess. He told Fortune magazine in 1980 that the Mercedes he drove was a hand-me-down from his wife. His son Bruce W. Hunt said his father kept mowing his lawn into his 70s.

In the early 1970s, the brothers began buying silver. They even took the unusual step of accepting delivery of the precious metal, which they stored in warehouses in New York, Switzerland and elsewhere. They used their silver as collateral to buy silver-futures contracts, which paid off handsomely as the price of the precious metal climbed.

Then everything fell apart.

Between September 1979 and January 1980, the price of silver rose from around $11 an ounce to about $50. Reports at the time estimated that the Hunts and their partners controlled up to two-thirds of a year's supply of silver. But when the price tanked, dropping to $10.80 on March 27, what is now known as Silver Thursday, the brothers were left facing their creditors, brokerage houses and government regulators.

The fallout dragged on for well over a decade. In 1988, a federal jury ordered the Hunts and others to pay $130 million to a commodities company owned by the government of Peru for their part in a scheme to manipulate and monopolize the silver market. The CFTC later charged them, along with others, of manipulating the price of silver bullion and silver futures contracts. Herbert and Bunker settled with the CFTC, paying millions in fines and accepting a ban on trading commodities. They both filed for personal bankruptcy.

Hunt didn't accept the charge that he had tried to corner the silver market. To him, he and his brothers were businessmen who tried to hedge against inflation and became victims of everyone from government regulators to short sellers at New York's Commodity Exchange whose rule changes caused the price of silver to drop.

I feel like the lady who had her purse snatched, he told Fortune, and then got arrested for indecent exposure because her clothes were ripped.

There were others who thought the brothers got a bad deal and weren't responsible for silver's boom and bust.

Economist William L. Silber says that silver has always been a volatile commodity and that major global events that occurred in 1979 and 1980 as the price of silver went up—hyperinflation, the Iranian hostage crisis, Russia's invasion of Afghanistan—were responsible for the steep rise in silver prices, not the Hunts.

We know now that silver always moves almost twice as much as gold, Silber, the author of The Story of Silver, said. They may have wanted to manipulate silver, but they were not responsible for silver moving twice as much as gold.

To read the complete article, see:
Herbert Hunt, Billionaire Who Tried to Corner the Silver Market, Dies at 95 (https://www.wsj.com/finance/commodities-futures/herbert-hunt-billionaire-silver-market-dies-at-95-4d73913a)

	NBS (coinbooks.org) Web