# Silver Thursday **Silver Thursday (March 27, 1980)** was the day the silver market collapsed, ending [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]] and his brothers' attempt to corner the world's silver supply. It is a landmark episode in [[Hard Money Politics]] — wealthy conservatives trying to escape dollar inflation by fleeing into precious metal — and, in [[Dave Troy]]'s "[[The Octopus]]" synthesis, the financial backstory of the men who bankrolled the private anti-communist right. ## The corner Texas oil heirs [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]] and [[William Herbert Hunt]] (with their brother Lamar) began accumulating silver in 1973 as a hedge against a weakening dollar and runaway inflation. By early 1980 they controlled, by various estimates, roughly a third of the world's non-governmental silver, driving the price from about $6/oz in early 1979 to a peak near **$49/oz in January 1980**. Regulators responded: the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the commodity exchanges imposed new margin requirements and position limits ("Silver Rule 7") designed to deflate the position. When silver began falling and the Hunts faced margin calls they could not meet, the price cratered on March 27, 1980 — Silver Thursday — threatening to take brokerage houses down with them. A consortium of banks arranged a bailout loan to contain the damage. ## The political tail The collapse, subsequent litigation, and a 1988 bankruptcy ultimately consumed most of the Hunt fortune. But before that decline, the Hunts' silver-era wealth had funded the conservative movement at high intensity. Tied to the [[John Birch Society]] (and its president [[Larry McDonald]]), the brothers: - helped fund the [[Heritage Foundation]] (founded 1973 with [[Paul Weyrich]]); - helped fund [[Western Goals]] (1979), the private intelligence operation behind later Contra fundraising and the [[Iran-Contra Affair]]; - helped seed the [[Council for National Policy]] (1981). Troy's point in the Octopus frame: the same hard-money instinct that drove the silver corner also financed the institutions at the center of the modern right — and the "silver decade" of peak Hunt wealth (1973–1980) lines up almost exactly with the construction of the New Right's infrastructure. ## See also - [[Nelson Bunker Hunt]] · [[William Herbert Hunt]] · [[Hard Money Politics]] · [[Western Goals]] · [[The Octopus]]