Anyone remember the Hunt Bros.

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@Kurisu he has a few more of these, they are just two sided. 3 on consignment for a hundo.

 

I remember the Flatspin Brothers. William is still temporal at 94. I wonder if silver will get a psychological boost after he clocks out?

 

I remember the Hunt bros shenanigans allowing me to sell a small portion of my collection at the time for a ridiculous profit.

 

Almost $50 an ounce - and that was in 1980 dollars, about $185 in 2023 dollars!

 

CC mm?

 

I'm curious about that myself. "San Francisco" right above "CC" seems odd. I wasn't paying attention to the whole Hunt brothers thing until reading about it years later. Wasn't buying or selling silver so I didn't care.

 

I think it hit $55 at one point.

The Hunt Brothers showed how a billionaire can find the way to go broke.

It's very simple, realy. You borrow on your silver holdings so that you can buy more silver holdings.

Let's say you buy 1 ounce of silver for $10. If it goes up to $20, you have doubled your money.

But let's say you invest $5 of your own money and borrow the other $5. If the price goes to $20, you have quadrupled your money. GREAT! You have made $15 from your $5 investment.

Let's say you keep borrowing and buying and you get more inventive by getting into the futures market. After a while you control many thousands of ounces of silver. The Hunt Brothers thought they could control the silver market with their great wealth and even more borrowing. If the price goes up, your gains go up exponentially. But if the price goes down, your losses also go up exponentially. You also owe money you don’t have because the silver you used to for collateral to borrow the money is now worth a lot less. Borrowers call their margins, and you are up the creek.

Your financial world collapses, and you are a broke ex-billionaire. That’s what happened to the Hunt Brothers.

And that’s what happened in October 1929 which get the Great Depression rolling.

 

Continental Coin Corporation, Van Nuys, CA

 

I believe the (margin) rules were changed during the game which is one reason they went broke and why silver had such a wicked reversal.

 

Chicago Board of Trade took out the Hunt brothers as @GoldFinger1969 posted. I remember. I had a silver plating company insured at the time.

 

I remember the Hudson Brothers.......(devil)

Hunts too.....

 

Yep. Had some the other day,

 

Please post any silver minted from the time period.
from The Silver Institute.
1979-1980 | (silverinstitute.org)
By 1979, investors and other market participants had come to the strong conviction that the silver market was facing a severe shortage of metal, and that prices were likely to rise sharply at some point. The market had been living off of investor selling for seven years. Prices had risen from the beginning of the decade, but there were serious questions as to how much longer investors would be willing and able to continue supplying silver to fabricators, at least at the prices seen in the mid-1970s.

World economic and political events also were coming to bear on the silver market, most notably in the form of a major cyclical upward surge in inflation throughout the industrialized world. Sensing that silver prices should be adjusting upward to compensate for these inflationary trends, many investors decided that silver prices between $4.00 and $5.50, which had prevailed during most of the late 1970s, were too low. Investors ceased selling their old silver holdings, and instead began adding to their holdings. This added further upward pressure to the price of silver. Simplistic retrospectives of the silver market in late 1979 tend to focus on the high-profile purchases of large amounts of silver and silver futures by various wealthy individuals; in reality, there was a tremendously broad-based rush to buy silver by investors worldwide at the time.

By the final quarter of 1979, silver prices had risen to levels between $15.00 and $25.00 per ounce. At these levels several physical market forces combined to act against higher prices. Additionally, the two major U.S. futures exchanges that traded silver at the time took steps to force those with margined long positions to liquidate their positions. During the Hunt brothers’ accumulation of the silver, prices of silver bullion rose from $11 an ounce in September 1979 to $49.45 an ounce in January 1980 based on London PM Fix. Silver prices ultimately fell to below $11 an ounce two months later.

 

I remember buying coin silver at 2 to 3X face, Silver Eagles at $6 each and common Morgans at $10. I was a bit young and poor when all the Hunt stuff went on. Fun thread. I had forgot most of the details.

 

One thing I remember from then was the rise of the art bar craze. Wish I had hung on to some of those.

 

Those were the days!
2.2 Troy oz

 

I remember when all that went on. I was a pimple faced teen getting very interested in girls and I thought a motor scooter was the way to impress them. I think that was the only time in my life that I sold my coins for another pursuit. Those old dimes, halves and quarters I sold funded a very old Honda 90 motor scooter…. And no, it didn’t attract girls as I had hoped.

 

After the FED butchered the Hunts the price of silver collapsed all through the '80's and '90's. All those art bars I wanted in the '70's became quite affordable. I was picking up even the highest priced issues like the 1971 FM Christmas bar for $4. I bought lots of the rarities for 4 to $12 each.

Timing is everything. Now a few of those bars have a premium once again.

Causing the price of silver to collapse will probably come back and bite us in the long run. The metal has been wasted on frivolities and someday there will be a massive shortage because it is needed in all high tech. There simply won't be enough to do all the things we need done.