Word: hunted
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...midweek silver was down to $15.80 per oz.; on Thursday it lost roughly a third of its value in a single day, falling as low as $10.20. Stories that Hunt was also selling other commodities touched off a frenzy that hammered prices not only of gold but also of copper, cotton and even cattle. Gold alone, which had reached a preposterous height of $850 per oz. in late January, dropped to a low of $463 last week. In the stock market, further rumors reported that Hunt and his associates were dumping stocks to raise cash in order to repay their...
...perhaps $2 billion left after that? A Saudi, maybe, and in fact there were three Saudi Arabian colleagues plus a Brazilian. But their leader, the man who shook the world's commodities markets and almost caused a financial panic last week, is an archetypal Texas wheeler-dealer, Nelson Bunker Hunt...
...does not look the part. A 225-lb. man of 54, Bunker Hunt dresses in inexpensive brown suits, though he bridles when they are called cheap ("I don't know where you can buy cheap clothes," he says). He neither smokes nor drinks, drives himself to work in a 1973 Cadillac, and lists his phone number openly in the Dallas telephone directory. His taste in food is plain. Says one associate: "He is the kind of guy who will order chicken-fried steak and JellO, spill some on his tie, and then go out and buy all the silver...
...quite. The Hunt group's own figures indicate that last week it owned only two-thirds of all the commercial silver that is not in government or industrial users' hands. But Hunt is surely the biggest commodity speculator in the country. He has been accused in the past of trying to corner the market in soybeans as well as silver. He has also made and lost fortunes in oil, directs the Hunt family's control of one of the nation's largest sugar-beet processors, and owns what may be the world's largest stable of race horses (600). Altogether...
...nothing but dry holes, more than $11 million worth. Undaunted, he sank $250 million into exploration ventures in the Middle East and North Africa. In 1961 he discovered the Sarir field in Libya, one of the biggest single oil finds ever. But in 1973 Libya nationalized his holdings, depriving Hunt of potential future profits that could have run into the billions. For a while, one biographer believes, he was not even a billionaire...