The Hunt brothers tried to corner the silver market — and lost $1.7B on Silver Thursday

Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt, sons of oil billionaire H. L. Hunt, began accumulating silver in the early 1970s. By 1979, they had amassed approximately 195 million ounces of silver — roughly half the world's deliverable supply — using massive leverage through futures contracts. As the Hunts bought, the price soared from under $6 per ounce in early 1979 to over $50 per ounce in January 1980, a more than eightfold increase.

The bubble burst when the exchanges imposed position limits and restricted trading to liquidation only. On 25–26 March 1980, Herbert Hunt told creditors the family had no cash or collateral left. On 27 March, Silver Thursday, the price collapsed to $10.80 per ounce, down 80% from its peak. The broker Bache Halsey Stuart Shields was left with a $122 million unsecured debit balance in Hunt accounts, and the SEC suspended trading in Bache's stock.

A consortium of 13 banks provided a $1.1 billion rescue loan to the Hunts' Placid Oil, secured by oil and gas assets. In 1988, a federal jury found the Hunts liable for conspiring to corner the silver market, entering a $134 million judgment. Bunker and Herbert Hunt filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy later that year — one of the largest personal bankruptcy filings in Texas history. The CFTC fined them and barred them from commodities trading. The case remains the most famous attempt to corner a market in modern history.