History remembers the final nominal full of the price of silver before the more recent a lot of $49.77 seen in April of 2011 being an anomaly that was largely induced by the Hunt brothers' purported make an effort to corner the marketplace by purchasing vast amounts of silver and silver futures to the point where they held rights to in excess of half the global quantity of deliverable silver.
This remarkable event began within the late seventies and led to a sharp rise in the price of silver to a then-all time a lot of $48.70 per ounce. The dramatic rally culminated at the begining of 1980 after COMEX silver exchange trading rules were changed to make margin purchases more difficult, thereby forcing the Hunt Brothers to miss a $100 million margin call. The price of silver then collapsed in a traumatic market event that occurred on March 27th of that same year, which has since been dubbed Silver Thursday.
Although later forced to shell out on the hundred million dollars on civil claims that they conspired to corner the silver market, a loss that ultimately led to their bankruptcy filing, the Hunts claimed that they are simply trying to begin a gold and silver backed currency as an alternative to the virtually intrinsically worthless paper Greenback.
Inflation Reflects Insufficient Faith in Paper Currency
Interestingly, 1980 was also the ninth year of the first time in modern world history where no major world currency - apart from the Swiss Franc that retained a 40 % gold reserve backing until this insurance policy was ended by referendum in May of 2000 -was backed by anything apart from faith in the issuer.
In lots of ways, the notably high inflation rates of the 1970's in the United States was an earlier test of this faith. This phenomenon was directly attributable to the unilateral removal by then-President Richard Nixon in 1971 of the U.S. Dollar in the defacto standard which had made it the lynchpin of the post-WWII Brett on Woods system of fixed exchange rates.
Impact of the Hunts' Efforts
The machine has matured considerably since those days. The Hunts managed a small corner in a bigger market, but the Hunts' long positions were actually smaller than today's manipulative short positions. The silver market is also much smaller today, with regards to the accessibility to above-ground investment grade silver bars and coins.
Many people choose to ignore this fact, perhaps let's **ume that the cost of re-mining the billions of ounces of as yet un-recycled silver sequestered in the large number of electronics, solders, switches, wiring, missiles, ballbearings, old jewelry and silverware won't someday be priced into the precious metal's value.
Nevertheless, the Hunt effect has had an extended effect on the silver market. For individuals who came old throughout the late seventies and either took part in or simply followed the following dramatic witch hunt, the events designed a lasting impression and those days seem almost like yesterday within the minds of many observers.
The generation coming of age within the death of equities and the decimation from the Dollar's value in an era of exceptionally loose monetary policy has become facing the very same fears that originally motivated the Hunts to purchase silver.
The new longs really are a diverse group - rather than concentrated holdings that will constitute an industry corner - and most of them are thinking about taking physical having silver. This trend may ultimately make the paper futures marketplace for silver obsolete, leaving it to be dominated by the trading machines.
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Monetary Charlatans Ignore History's Lessons
One key problem with today's monetary charlatans is that they seem quite content to completely ignore the teachings of history. This includes the recent sordid experience with contemporary "activist" central banking and also the resulting persistent monetary inflation that has prevailed in the last twenty years.
History may now be repeating that test. While the man - former Fed Chief Paul Volker -that was then responsible for administering the unpleasant medicine and therefore re-establishing a temporary confidence within the Dollar now plays a symbolic role, administering the slightest fraction of this same medicine by means of higher interest rates would mostly likely kill the patient altogether.