Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, sons of the legendary Texas oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, spent the late 1970s attempting one of the most audacious financial gambits in history: an effort to corner the global silver market. Beginning in the early 1970s and accelerating sharply at the decade’s end — often with Saudi partners and their younger brother Lamar — the brothers bought silver bullion and silver futures contracts on an enormous scale, taking physical delivery rather than settling in cash and tying up a large share of the world’s deliverable supply. By late 1979 they were estimated to hold over 100 million troy ounces, about a third of the world’s privately held silver.
The campaign drove the price of silver from roughly $6.08 an ounce on January 1, 1979, to a peak of $49.45 an ounce on January 18, 1980 — a 713 percent run that, on paper, briefly made the Hunts’ holdings worth billions. But a corner is only profitable if you can sell into it, and the same surge that enriched them on paper alarmed the commodities exchanges and federal regulators, who saw a single family distorting a strategic metal market.
In early January 1980 the COMEX exchange imposed emergency restrictions — the rule remembered as “Silver Rule 7” — limiting positions and tightening margin, effectively halting new buying and forcing liquidation. The price went into reverse. On March 27, 1980 — “Silver Thursday” — silver collapsed roughly 50 percent in a single session, from $21.62 to $10.80 an ounce, and the Hunts, unable to meet a margin call of about $100 million owed to their broker Bache, triggered fears of a chain-reaction failure on Wall Street.
A consortium of banks arranged a roughly $1.1 billion bailout loan to wind down the position in an orderly way and prevent a wider crisis. But the rescue only delayed the reckoning for the Hunts themselves. They lost well over a billion dollars on silver, faced years of litigation, and in August 1988 a federal jury found that Bunker and Herbert Hunt had conspired to manipulate the market, awarding the Peruvian minerals firm Minpeco roughly $134 million. The following month both brothers filed for personal bankruptcy — among the largest individual filings in U.S. history at the time.
William Crapo Durant was one of the great empire-builders of the American automobile age — and one of its most complete financial casualties. Having already made a fortune in horse-drawn carriages, he founded General Motors on September 16, 1908, by bundling together a string of fledgling car and parts companies, and he later co-founded Chevrolet. At his peak in the 1920s his fortune was enormous — popularly estimated as high as nearly $1 billion at the height of the boom — and he was a titan of American industry.
Durant’s genius was promotion, expansion, and the audacious deal; his weakness was that the same restless, leveraged optimism that built his empires repeatedly cost him control of them. He was forced out of General Motors not once but twice — in 1910 by the bankers who refinanced his over-extended company, and again in 1920 when a postwar slump and his own stock-market commitments left him unable to hold on.
After losing GM the second time he launched Durant Motors and threw himself into the booming stock market of the late 1920s, trading and promoting shares on an enormous scale and on heavy margin. The 1929 crash destroyed him. The man who had built the world’s largest automaker saw his fortune wiped out, Durant Motors was liquidated in 1933, and in 1936 he filed for bankruptcy, listing assets of only a few hundred dollars against liabilities of roughly a million.
Durant spent his final years in Flint, Michigan — the city where his career had begun — running modest ventures including a bowling alley (the North Flint Recreation Center, opened 1940) and an attached drive-in restaurant, the Horseshoe Inn, which he promoted with the same enthusiasm he had once brought to building GM. A stroke in 1942 ended his plans to build a national chain, and he died on March 18, 1947, his bills reportedly covered by Alfred P. Sloan and the Chrysler family. He remains the archetype of the builder who could create vast wealth but never learned to hold it.
Horace Austin Warner Tabor — “Haw” to the men of Leadville — was a Vermont-born stonecutter and shopkeeper who spent two decades scratching at the edges of one mining camp after another before a single grubstake made him, almost overnight, one of the richest men in America. In 1878 he staked two German prospectors who blundered into the Little Pittsburg, a fabulous silver lode; the following year he bought the Matchless Mine outright. By 1881 he was reckoned worth around nine million dollars — the equivalent of hundreds of millions today — and he spent it on the scale of a man who could not quite believe it would ever stop coming.
Tabor built opera houses in Leadville and Denver, raised the Tabor Block downtown, served as the first mayor of Leadville and as Colorado’s lieutenant governor, and bought a thirty-day seat in the United States Senate. He also divorced Augusta, the frugal wife who had endured the lean years with him, and married Elizabeth “Baby Doe” McCourt in a Washington wedding so lavish and so scandalous that respectable society never quite forgave either of them.
The fortune rested on a single commodity, and that commodity rested on a single act of Congress. The Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890 propped up the price of silver by obliging the Treasury to buy it; when the Panic of 1893 hit and President Grover Cleveland forced the Act’s repeal that autumn, the silver market collapsed. Tabor, leveraged and overextended, watched mine after mine and building after building slip away to his creditors within a matter of months.
He died in 1899, six years after the crash, having spent his last year as the postmaster of Denver — a patronage appointment arranged by friends who remembered what he had been. His widow Baby Doe kept her husband’s deathbed faith with the Matchless Mine, living in a cabin beside its played-out shaft until she was found frozen there in the winter of 1935. The Tabors became Colorado’s enduring parable of the silver age: the speed of the rise, the completeness of the fall, and the long cold coda no one could have written for them.
Clarence Saunders was the Memphis grocer who reinvented how the world buys food. On September 6, 1916, he opened the first Piggly Wiggly store at 79 Jefferson Avenue in Memphis, where shoppers — for the first time — passed through turnstiles, pulled their own goods from open shelves, and paid at a single checkout. The self-service layout he patented in 1917 became the template for the modern supermarket, and within a few years Piggly Wiggly franchises spread across the country; the company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in February 1922.
Saunders was a flamboyant, self-made man who believed his own legend. When bear raiders on Wall Street began selling Piggly Wiggly stock short in late 1922 and early 1923 — wagering the company would fall after several independently owned Eastern franchises failed — Saunders took it personally. Rather than ignore the speculators, he resolved to beat them at their own game by quietly buying up nearly every available share of his own company, attempting one of the last great stock corners in American history.
He nearly pulled it off. Borrowing roughly $10 million, Saunders bought so heavily that within weeks he controlled almost all of Piggly Wiggly’s freely traded shares, squeezing the short sellers who now had to buy from him to cover their positions. The price climbed from about $39 to roughly $124 by March 20, 1923. But with the shorts trapped, the New York Stock Exchange declared that a corner existed, suspended trading in Piggly Wiggly the next day, halted it permanently on March 26, and granted the short sellers extra time to deliver their shares — breaking the squeeze Saunders had built.
The reprieve was fatal. Saunders was left holding millions in stock he could not sell at the prices he had paid, crushed by the loans he had taken to buy it. In August 1923 he resigned as president and surrendered his property — his stock, his cars, even his unfinished Memphis mansion, the “Pink Palace” — to his creditors, and personal bankruptcy followed. He spent the rest of his life chasing comeback ventures, including a second grocery chain and an automated store called the Keedoozle, but never recovered the fortune the corner had cost him.
John Law was a Scottish gambler, theorist, and convicted duelist who talked his way into control of an entire nation’s finances and, for a dizzying few months, became perhaps the wealthiest private individual in the world. Between 1716 and 1720 he founded France’s first central bank, took over the trading monopoly for France’s vast Louisiana territory, and merged the two into a single colossus whose shares he sold to a public gripped by speculative fever. At the peak in late 1719 and early 1720, the mania he engineered minted overnight fortunes, gave the French language its word for a ‘millionaire,’ and made Law himself Controller General of the Finances of France — the kingdom’s chief economic officer.
The scheme rested on a genuinely modern and genuinely fragile idea: that paper money and bank credit, properly managed, could stimulate trade and replace the chronic shortage of gold and silver coin. Law’s bank issued notes, his company issued shares, and the two propped each other up — the bank’s notes were used to buy the shares, and the rising shares justified printing more notes. As long as confidence held, the spiral lifted everything. The moment confidence faltered, the same linkage ran in reverse with terrifying speed.
In 1720 it faltered. As insiders cashed out and converted paper into hard coin and land, the share price began to fall; Law’s attempts to prop it up by decree — restricting coin, forcing acceptance of paper, then abruptly devaluing both shares and notes — only accelerated the panic. The Mississippi Bubble burst, wiping out a generation of French investors, discrediting paper money in France for decades, and shattering Law’s own immense fortune almost as fast as he had built it.
Stripped of office and reviled, Law fled France at the end of 1720 with little more than he had arrived with. He spent his last years wandering Europe and gambling for a living, and died in Venice in 1729, poor and largely forgotten — the architect of one of the first great financial bubbles, undone by the very mechanism he had invented.