Silver Thursday
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Silver Thursday was 27 March 1980 when the American brothers Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, seeking to corner the silver markets, were unable to meet a margin call on their futures contracts.
The brothers were two of the fourteen children of the Texas oil magnate H. L. Hunt, who was the richest man in the United States when he died in 1974. Bunker and Herbert started investing in silver as a hedge against inflation and by 1980 it was estimated that they held one-third of the world's supply of the metal. When silver prices slid, the Hunt brothers failed to meet huge margin calls on their futures contracts, sparking a panic on commodity and futures exchanges. A consortium of US banks provided a USD$1.1 billion line of credit to enable the brothers to pay their debts. The Hunts lost hundreds of millions of dollars through their speculation in silver but the family fortunes withstood the setback.
[edit] Reference
- Great Silver Bubble by The Artist Formerly Known As Something, 1982. (Out of print book.)
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- Production Capitalism vs. Financial Capitalism - a Norwegian 'workshop' from 1998 that puts the 'Silver Bubble' in context
- Silver Thursday definition
Panics: Panic of 1819 • Panic of 1873 • Panic of 1884 • Panic of 1893 • Panic of 1896 • Panic of 1901 • Panic of 1907
1997 East Asian financial crisis • Black Friday (1869) • Black Monday (1987) • Black Tuesday • Friday the 13th mini-crash • Hindenburg Omen • October 27, 1997 mini-crash • Russian financial crisis • Silver Thursday • Souk Al-Manakh stock market crash • Stock market downturn of 2002 • Wall Street Crash of 1929 •
List of stock market crashes
