Nelson Bunker Hunt

(just in case you have been asleep in a cave)

The recent run-up in the amount of fiat currency that people are trading for hard silver has been quite spectacular recently, from $17 to $49 in one year’s time. For at least the past several weeks this has been garnering widespread publicity. As can be expected, comparisons and contrasts are being drawn with an incident within my memory and that of numerous other market participants, namely the attempted cornering of the whole silver market by Nelson Bunker Hunt and associates during the decade of the 1970’s.

An article that appeared in 1980 in Playboy which detailed the machinations is making the rounds and being extensively quoted and paraphrased.

I am finding that there is a rather extensive omission in the information of that article. Yes, it says that for a brief time Bunker was the wealthiest that any single man has ever been, with a NAV north of $4B at a time when the advertising campaign at McDonalds was “a big mac, fries, a coke, and change back from your dollar!”

Okay, yes, the roof fell in on him. Yes, the tightening of margin requirements at the Comex had a lot to do with the crash. Yes, after the crash he was, if not left penniless, at least reduced back to human proportions. Okay, so where did the $4B go? Did it just vanish, as all the articles seem to imply? Did it (Ha Ha!) go back to "the people"?

I can’t offer cold, hard facts here, I seem to recollect a few admissions at the time which have since disappeared from print. Volker was of course involved; he backed up the project with the unlimited credit of the Federal Reserve. There were key players. Partners at the Comex. Large bankers who could not stand for inflation to get out of hand, let alone for it to be generally understood by the public for what it really is, grand theft by the bankers and politicians from everybody with a positive net worth. Partners such as JPMorgan. As I recall, the Comex changed its rules, somewhat illegally, to establish not only margin limits but position limits on longs (but those same limits have never been enforced upon shorts!). And NY megabanks, operating together behind the scenes, took out huge short positions.

So where did the $4B go, now? Well, of course, it all went to the banks holding the shorts.

And some of them remember. Greedily? Well you know about bankers by now, right?

Now I know you all are now realizing something. There is no NBH this time playing on the long side against the establishment. The situation is different this time. Its all of us, isn’t it ….
And all the talk, all the bombast, all the paper, all the contracts, all the fake news articles opining about bubbles, all the bamboozle in the world, cannot create one more dime of real silver.