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...last week was a classic. What happened, apparently, was that Nelson Bunker Hunt, one of the world's richest men (see following story), set out with some associates to accumulate immense hoards of silver last year. Their buying helped drive up prices from $6 per oz. in early 1979 to $50 two months ago. The Hunt group then seemingly borrowed against its silver profits to buy other commodities and stocks. But the $50 price of silver could not be sustained, and when it began to slip the whole pyramid began to tumble...
...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...
There were other factors: world demand for silver, spurred largely by its use in photographic materials, regularly exceeds new production from mines, and Hunt believed silver was greatly undervalued in relation to gold. Bunker and his brother Herbert bought in 1973 an astonishing 35 million oz. in futures contracts. Their buying drove prices up for a while, but when the brothers stopped their purchases, prices fell again. The Hunts lost an estimated $25 million to $50 million on paper. Undeterred, Bunker called for actual delivery of the metal, a rare occurrence in commodity markets, and just kept...
Last year Bunker and his syndicate began buying silver again, this time on a truly gargantuan scale. They were soon imitated by other speculators shaken by international crises and distrustful of paper money. It was this that sent the price of silver from $6 per oz. in early 1979 to $50 per oz. in January of this year. Chairman Walter Hoving of Tiffany & Co., the famous jewelry store, was incensed. Tiffany ran an ad in the New York Times last week asserting: "We think it is unconscionable for anyone to hoard several billion, yes billion, dollars worth of silver...
...gold mine, indeed. Most of the available IF is now obtained from the Finnish Red Cross and the Central Public Health Laboratory in Helsinki, which extract it from white blood cells separated from donated blood. The output in 1979 was minuscule, 400 mg (.014 oz.) gleaned from 45,000 liters (90,000 pints) of blood. The effort is so painstaking that, according to estimates by scientists at the California Institute of Technology, a pound of pure interferon would cost between $10 billion and $20 billion. That price will certainly decline as large companies enter the field with more efficient production...