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.
Ulysses S. Grant won the Civil War for the Union and served two terms as President of the United States, yet he spent the final year of his life racing against bankruptcy and a fatal cancer. After leaving office, the famously incorruptible general proved a disastrous judge of business partners, and in 1884 a Wall Street Ponzi scheme bearing his own name destroyed nearly everything he had.
The firm was Grant & Ward, a brokerage in which Grant invested alongside his son and the dazzling young financier Ferdinand Ward. Ward, hailed as the “Young Napoleon of Wall Street,” was in fact running a fraud, paying old investors with new investors’ money and inventing imaginary government contracts. When the scheme collapsed on May 6, 1884, Grant — who had put his savings and his name behind it — walked out of his office a pauper, reportedly left with about $80 to his name while his wife Julia had another $130.
Destitution arrived alongside disease. Later in 1884 Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer, almost certainly linked to his lifelong cigar smoking, and he understood he was dying with no estate to leave his wife. To provide for Julia and the family, the dying general undertook one last campaign: writing his “Personal Memoirs,” a two-volume account of his Civil War years, published through Mark Twain’s company on extraordinarily generous terms.
Grant laid down his pen on July 16, 1885, having written some 366,000 words in less than a year, and died on July 23, 1885, at Mount McGregor, New York. The memoirs became a publishing triumph — both a literary masterpiece and a financial one — ultimately earning roughly $450,000 in royalties for his widow. The man who had been ruined by a swindle saved his family with his own pen in the last weeks of his life.
William Magear Tweed — known to New York and to history as ‘Boss’ Tweed — rose from a volunteer fire company on the Lower East Side to become the most powerful man in the city, the master of the Tammany Hall Democratic machine, and the head of a ring of officials who looted the municipal treasury on a scale that has never been precisely measured. Contemporary estimates of what the ‘Tweed Ring’ stole between roughly 1865 and 1871 ranged from about $25 million to as much as $200 million; some modern historians, adjusting for inflation and the full sweep of the graft, have suggested figures running into the billions of dollars. Whatever the true number, it was enough to make Tweed, for a few years, one of the largest landowners in New York and a director of banks, a railroad, and a hotel.
The machinery of the theft was almost banal in its method and breathtaking in its volume. The Ring controlled the bodies that audited and paid the city’s bills, and they simply padded those bills — contractors and suppliers were instructed to inflate their charges enormously, kick most of the surplus back to the Ring, and keep a share for their silence. The new New York County Courthouse, begun in 1861, became the monument to the scheme: a building budgeted at a few hundred thousand dollars that swallowed many millions, with thermometers, plastering, and furniture billed at sums that defied belief.
Tweed’s undoing came not from the police or the courts, which he largely owned, but from the press. The cartoonist Thomas Nast pilloried him relentlessly in Harper’s Weekly, rendering the rotund Boss in images so vivid that even the illiterate could understand them — Tweed reportedly complained less about the articles than about ‘them damned pictures.’ In July 1871 The New York Times, supplied with figures leaked from inside the comptroller’s office, published the Ring’s own accounts, laying the fraud out in columns of numbers the public could verify.
The exposure destroyed him. Tweed was arrested, tried, and convicted; he escaped from custody and fled the country, only to be recaptured in Spain — where, by a famous irony, officials are said to have identified him from one of Nast’s cartoons. He was returned to New York and died, broke and broken, in the Ludlow Street Jail in April 1878, in the very institution his own machine had once controlled.
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.