Nelson Bunker Hunt, R.I.P.: The Myth of the Hunt Brothers’ “Scheme to Corner the Silver Market”
“Nelson Bunker Hunt, oil fortune heir whose bid to corner the silver market led to ruin, dies.” So ran the headline of the Associated Press report, as it appeared in the U.S. News & World Report online edition for October 22. Similar headlines accompanied many other obituaries of the famous Texas investor/entrepreneur, and if the “tried to corner the silver market” charge didn’t appear in the title it was often in the opening sentence. Hunt (shown, center), a political conservative, was fated to be tagged with that epitaph by hostile Wall Street forces and the liberal-left media for the past three-decades-plus of his life. However, there is little evidence to support the “corner the market” narrative, regardless of the myriad of times it has been reported as “fact.”
During the 1970s, Hunt's savvy investments in oil, sugar, commodities, real estate — and especially silver — made him one of the wealthiest individuals on the planet. Because of his independence and his outspoken opposition to the Federal Reserve System and the ruinous policies of the federal government that were destroying the value of the dollar, he became a marked man. Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game on commodities trading and put the squeeze on him (along with his brother and investment partner Herbert Hunt) and then perpetuated the lie that the Hunt brothers had been “squeezing” the silver market. We will return with details of the great silver debacle below.
Nelson Bunker Hunt was born in 1926, in El Dorado, Arkansas, the second son of legendary Texas wildcatter H.L. Hunt, who had amassed one of the world’s great fortunes by developing the East Texas Oil Field. Following in his father’s footsteps, Bunker (he went by his middle name) built — and lost — a number of fortunes in oil, silver, sugar, soybeans, pizza, cattle, coins, real estate, ranching, and thoroughbred horse racing.
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