The Story of Silver
Page 1
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THE STORY OF
SILVER
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Silver Prices for 200 Years
This semi-log chart shows the annual average price per troy ounce of pure silver in U.S. dollars from 1792 through 2015 and some of the major events influencing the white metal during that period. The data are spliced from the following sources: 1) The U.S. Mint price from 1792–1833; 2) The average market price reported by the Department of the Mint, 1834–1909; 3) The average of monthly prices reported by the CRB database, 1910–1946; 4) The average of daily prices reported by the CRB database, 1947–2015. The annual average price in 1980 is lower than in 2011, even though the daily peak price ($50) was higher in 1980, because daily prices fell more precipitously during 1980 compared with 2011. Note: Because of inflation, the value of $1.29 in 1792 is equivalent to $31.30 in current dollars of 2011, when silver hit a peak of $48 (based on the consumer price index calculator from the EH.net website of the Economic History Association).
By the Same Author
Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence
When Washington Shut Down Wall Street:
The Great Financial Crisis of 1914 and the Origins of
America’s Monetary Supremacy
Financial Options: From Theory to Practice (coauthor)
Principles of Money, Banking, and Financial Markets (coauthor)
Financial Innovation (editor)
Money (coauthor)
Portfolio Behavior of Financial Institutions
* * *
THE STORY OF
SILVER
* * *
HOW THE WHITE METAL SHAPED
AMERICA AND THE MODERN WORLD
WILLIAM L. SILBER
PRINCET ON UNIVERSITY PRESS
PRINCETON & OXFORD
Copyright © 2019 by Princeton University Press
Published by Princeton University Press
41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540
6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR
press.princeton.edu
All Rights Reserved
LCCN 2018941299
ISBN 9780691175386
eISBN 9780691184517 (ebook)
Version 1.0
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available
Editorial: Peter Dougherty and Jessica Yao
Production Editorial: Natalie Baan
Text and Jacket Design: Leslie Flis
Production: Jacqueline Poirier
Publicity: James Schneider
Jacket Credit: 1879 US silver dollar
To
Danny
You left us too soon
CONTENTS
* * *
From the Author xiii
Main Characters xvii
INTRODUCTION
Obsession 1
CHAPTER 1
Hamilton’s Design 10
CHAPTER 2
Solving the Crime of 1873 17
CHAPTER 3
Free Silver 27
CHAPTER 4
Seeds of Roosevelt’s Manipulation 38
CHAPTER 5
FDR Promotes Silver 45
CHAPTER 6
Silver Subsidy 52
CHAPTER 7
China and America Collide 60
CHAPTER 8
Bombshell in Shanghai 71
CHAPTER 9
Silver Lining 90
CHAPTER 10
Costly Victory 99
CHAPTER 11
JFK’s Double Cross 104
CHAPTER 12
LBJ Nails the Coffin Shut 119
CHAPTER 13
Psychiatrist’s Meltdown 131
CHAPTER 14
Battle Lines 146
CHAPTER 15
Nelson Bunker Hunt 150
CHAPTER 16
Heavyweight Fight 165
CHAPTER 17
Saudi Connection 175
CHAPTER 18
Silver Soars 183
CHAPTER 19
Collapse 202
CHAPTER 20
The Trial 224
CHAPTER 21
Buffett’s Manipulation? 236
CHAPTER 22
Message from Omaha 242
CHAPTER 23
The Past Informs the Future 249
Notes 253
Selected Bibliography 317
About the Author 327
Illustration Credits 329
Index 331
A lover of silver will never be satisfied with silver.
—Ecclesiastes 5
FROM THE AUTHOR
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I DID NOT KNOW NELSON BUNKER HUNT, WHOSE DEATH IN 2014 spawned this book project, but many who knew him well shared their insights and recollections. I could not have written the story of silver without them. Phil Geraci of the Kay Scholer law firm that represented the Hunt brothers during their silver manipulation trial was a young lawyer back then and provided key personal observations from his six-month interaction with the Hunts. His assistant Patricia Apuzzo made it easy to use the related material. Henry Jarecki, whose business dealings with the Hunts while chairman of Mocatta Metals Corporation lasted more than a decade, gave me access to his unpublished manuscript that offered details unavailable elsewhere. His assistant Emily Goodnight made the process enjoyable and productive. Professor Jeffrey Williams served as an expert witness for the Hunts at their 1988 trial and provided copies of plaintiff and defendant expert reports that had been stored in his garage since then. I also relied on his excellent book on the economic testimony at the trial.
But this book is more than just about the Hunts. It is the story of silver, so at the beginning I spent a day with silversmith Geoffrey Blake at Old Newbury Crafters in Amesbury, Massachusetts, watching him mold the white metal into sterling silver flatware with the same tools and techniques that Paul Revere might have used. The ancient craft practiced in Blake’s dusty basement workshop contrasted with the modern spectrograph used by Don and Angelo Palmieri in their Gem Certification & Assurance Lab to determine whether sterling silver jewelry contains the required 92.5% pure silver. But some things do not change. I watched Albert Robert (Irina and Gabriel’s cousin) of the New York Gold Refining Company turn a silver coin into molten metal by heating it in a blackened crucible over an open flame as in ancient times.
My research work benefited from the cheerful effort of many individuals. I owe Carol Arnold-Hamilton, Alicia Estes, and Robert Platt, librarians at NYU’s Bobst, for recovering source material that challenged Google’s algorithms. Jack Shim, an outstanding PhD student at NYU Stern, and Omer Morashti, a great Stern MBA, analyzed the data with surgical skill. Bob Oppenheimer shared firsthand observations of the silver ring at the Commodity Exchange (Comex). Bernard Septimus, my friend for as long as I can remember, applied his biblical expertise to keep my references consistent with modern scholarship. Seth Ditchik and Bruce Tuchman read an early draft and molded the framework of the story for the better. Dick Sylla, Ken Garbade, and Paul Wachtel read the entire manuscript as if it were their own and scrubbed the fuzzy logic from the final product. Peter Dougherty, my editor at Princeton University Press, offered sage advice and gentle encouragement throughout the process. His e-mails at 5 a.m. were just the tip of the iceberg. My wife, Lillian, let me work on the book whenever I wasn’t playing golf, read every word, and excised most (but certainly not all) of the annoying metaphors. And I apologize to my children and grandchildren for not calling the book “Silber on Silver,” a unanimous recommendation at our family gatherings that fell to the cutting room floor like so many other gems.
SOURCE MATERIALS
No one needs to read the notes
appearing at the end of the book, but they are there to expand on historical details and to provide technical information. The notes contain citations to newspapers, periodicals, academic articles, and books to support specific opinions and quotations appearing in the text. Statistical tests and a precise explanation of silver price data also appear in the notes. Silver prices usually refer to the price of physical silver in the form of bullion bars. These are sometimes called cash prices to distinguish them from prices in the futures market that become important in the second half of the book. The silver price data come from a variety of sources: 1) annual data during the nineteenth century come from the Annual Report of the Director of the Mint, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1936; 2) daily data on silver prices during the 1930s were hand-collected from the Wall Street Journal, which published cash market quotations by bullion dealer Handy & Harman; 3) daily data on cash prices since 1947 and futures prices since 1963 were purchased from the Commodity Research Bureau (CRB), an independent data distributor that was a division of Knight-Ridder Financial Publishing and is now a division of Barchart.com, Inc., a Chicago-based vendor of financial data; and finally, (4) daily data on the London silver fix since 1968 come from the London Bullion Market Association as published by Quandl, an internet provider of economic and financial data.
A CONFESSION
The outline of this book when I started five years ago differs considerably from the final product. History surprised me with events and personalities that changed my thoughts and perceptions. I have shared those stories with you throughout this book and hope they are as pleasurable, instructive, and exciting for you as they were for me.
w.l.s.
MAIN CHARACTERS
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(IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDER)
Alexander Hamilton
America’s first secretary of the Treasury recommended both gold and silver definitions for the U.S. dollar in 1791 and chose the $1.29 price that the mint would pay per ounce of silver bullion. He recommended bimetallism, the coinage of both gold and silver, to promote economic growth and “to avoid the evils of a scanty circulation.”
John Sherman
U.S. senator from Ohio, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, used deception and misrepresentation to pass the Coinage Act of 1873, demonetizing silver and establishing gold as the sole backing for the U.S. currency. Sherman later served as secretary of the Treasury, secretary of state, and is most famous for the Sherman Antitrust Act but was vilified for the so-called Crime of 1873, down-grading silver, which shadowed American politics for a century.
William Jennings Bryan
The thirty-six-year-old U.S. congressman from Nebraska captured the 1896 Democratic nomination for the presidency with the electrifying “Cross of Gold” speech at the convention. Despite its name, the speech was all about silver, a response to twenty-five years of deflation in America since the Crime of 1873, pitting rural westerners favoring easy credit against the hard-money urban East. The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, published in 1900, memorialized the class battle and portrayed Bryan as the cowardly lion whose roar was greater than his bite. Bryan ran three times for the presidency and lost.
Key Pittman
Elected U.S. senator from Nevada, the Silver State, in 1913 and made a career with legislation to promote the white metal. He became the influential chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee in 1933 and led the Senate’s “silver bloc” of western mining states to convince the newly elected president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, to subsidize the price and production of the white metal. His support of silver debuted in 1918 with what was called the Pittman Act, authorizing the sale of silver to Great Britain to support the Indian rupee and then subsidizing the repurchase of the metal at above-market prices.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
Elected U.S. president in 1932 in a landslide, pushed legislation with the help of Key Pittman and his allies to cure the Great Depression, including taking the United States off the gold standard. FDR repaid Pittman with a December 1933 proclamation to subsidize domestic silver production and by signing the Silver Purchase Act of 1934. FDR’s programs doubled the price of the white metal, a boon to American mines but a catastrophe for Nationalist China. Smugglers drained the white metal from Shanghai banks for sale at inflated prices on world markets and forced the Asian giant off the silver standard.
Henry Morgenthau
Roosevelt’s neighbor in Dutchess County, New York, and a personal confidante, became FDR’s Treasury secretary and implemented the Silver Purchase Act for the president. Morgenthau nationalized the white metal and led a buying program to make silver 25% of America’s monetary reserves but warned Roosevelt that this made Nationalist China, led by American ally Chiang Kai-shek, vulnerable to an internal threat from Mao Tse-tung’s communist insurgents and an external threat from Imperial Japan. Morgenthau abandoned the aggressive buying program in December 1935, with the approval of Key Pittman, but failed to save China. The Silver Purchase Act tipped the balance of power in Japan away from the diplomats and towards the military, contributing to the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937.
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
Elected U.S. president in 1960 and assassinated on November 22, 1963, by Lee Harvey Oswald before his main legislative initiative on civil rights could be enacted by Congress. He succeeded in repealing FDR’s Silver Purchase Act in June 1963, a small step in making the white metal more readily available to industry. As a former senator from Massachusetts, home to silversmiths since the time of Paul Revere, Kennedy had long favored eliminating any monetary use of the white metal. The Warren Commission investigation into the assassination concluded that Oswald acted alone but failed to consider whether Kennedy was murdered for dropping the silver subsidy, a conspiracy theory no worse than the rest given the metal’s power to provoke passion and fury in the American heartland for more than a century.
Lyndon Baines Johnson
Succeeded Kennedy as U.S. president and completed much of JFK’s unfinished legislation, including freeing the white metal from government influence and eliminating in 1968 the connection between both gold and silver and domestic money and credit. Severing the link between precious metals and money allowed America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System, to deliver easy credit in response to political pressure, spawning the Great Inflation of the 1970s. The absence of government influence turned silver into a hard asset, unleashed a wave of speculation that drove the price above Alexander Hamilton’s $1.29, and roiled financial markets.
Henry Jarecki
A German-born psychiatrist in his midthirties on the faculty of Yale University Medical School, pioneer in the drug treatment of depression, abandoned his medical career in the late 1960s to capitalize on the silver frenzy. Jarecki made millions by arbitraging between the U.S. Treasury’s obligation to redeem silver certificates at the fixed price of $1.29 and the free market price of bullion on the Commodity Exchange. He spent the 1970s building Mocatta Metals Corporation into one of the biggest bullion trading companies in America and battling the Hunt brothers’ alleged attempt to manipulate the silver market.
Nelson Bunker Hunt
A member of the right-wing John Birch Society, Bunker became the richest man in the world at age forty in 1966 when oil was discovered in Libya, where he owned the drilling rights. His ultra-conservative politics made him distrust government and its paper currency and favor real investments, such as oil, land, racehorses, and precious metals. His preference for silver became an obsession in 1973 after Libya, under Muammar Qaddafi, nationalized his oil fields. He and his brothers, Herbert and Lamar, accumulated 200 million ounces of the white metal between 1973 and 1979, more than the combined annual output of the four largest producing countries in the world. Skyrocketing silver prices during 1979 raised the value of their holdings from $2 billion to $10 billion, bringing charges of price manipulation and leading to retaliation by the Exchanges that eventually forced Bunker into bankruptcy.
&
nbsp; Warren Buffett
The most successful investor in the second half of the twentieth century, famous for buying and holding companies that are understandable and run by outstanding people and avoiding assets like gold, which he said will “remain lifeless forever.” Buffett, CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, had been monitoring silver, which he considered more industrial than precious, for longer than Bunker Hunt. He finally plunged into the white metal in 1997, buying more than 100 million ounces, driving up the price, and triggering headlines that the Hunts were back in town. Buffett’s integrity quieted the uproar, but his investment strategy failed to match his reputation. He sold too early, leaving more than $4 billion on the table, and returned to investments like Coca Cola, which he has held forever.
INTRODUCTION
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OBSESSION
LAMAR HUNT, THE THIRTY-FOUR-YEAR-OLD OWNER OF THE KANSAS City Chiefs football team, negotiated the merger of the upstart American Football League with the older and well-established National Football League in 1966, creating the most successful sports enterprise in America. Hunt also invented the name Super Bowl, originally the championship game between the two leagues, and now the most popular single sporting event in the country. He explained the origin of his inspiration: “My daughter, Sharron, and my son, Lamar Jr., had a children’s toy called a Super Ball, and I probably interchanged the phonetics of ‘bowl’ and ‘ball.’ ”1