Slope of Hope Blog Posts

Slope initially began as a blog, so this is where most of the website’s content resides. Here we have tens of thousands of posts dating back over a decade. These are listed in reverse chronological order. Click on any category icon below to see posts tagged with that particular subject, or click on a word in the category cloud on the right side of the screen for more specific choices.

Silver Hunt (Part 3 of 3)

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Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.

Putting an End to It

At this point, the exchanges did something extraordinary: simply stated, they outlawed buying. More specifically, on January 21, 1980, the COMEX said that the only orders they would accept would be liquidation orders. No one could buy. They could only sell.

The market was past the point of shrugging off news like this. With no buyers permitted, the price went into a free-fall. The day after the announcement, silver plunged to $34. To add to the selling pressure, the everyday people of the American middle class finally woke up to silver’s sensationally high price and began selling everything they might possess with silver content, from heirloom silverware to coins jingling in canvas bags.

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Silver Hunt (Part 2 of 3)

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Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.

Gaddaffi

Around this time, a radical military man named Colonel Gaddafi seized power in Libya and nationalized the country’s oil wells. Of course, Bunker’s successful operation was one of these, and the arch-conservative Bunker expected the United States to take ferocious action against this thief. The U.S. did nothing of the sort, and Armand Hammer (the interestingly-named CEO of Occidental Petroleum) agreed to give Gaddafi a 51% “royalty” in exchange for continuing operations in Libya.

Bunker was incensed at this thinly veiled extortion payment. The Hunts had a grave distrust of many parties, including East Coast oil companies (led, they believed, by the Rockefeller clan), and Occidental’s capitulation to this lunatic Colonel was just more proof that their worldview was correct.

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Silver Hunt (Part 1 of 3)

By -

Preface: due to the intense interest in silver these days, I have decided to share a chapter from my Panic Prosperity and Progress book which focuses on the Hunt Brothers and their attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. I hope you enjoy it.

Precious Metals and the Destruction of a Billionaire

The stunning bull market in precious metals in the late 1970s, followed by its swift collapse, has a fascinating and remarkable history. The roots of the event date back to the dark days of the Great Depression, when President Roosevelt issued Executive Order 6102 which outlawed the “hoarding” (that is, the ownership in almost any form) of gold by any person or other entity within the United States.

Prior to this order, gold was intricately intertwined in the nation’s currency. U.S. dollars were convertible into gold on demand, and this convertibility had helped constrict the velocity of money severely. Roosevelt recognized that inflating the money supply was essential to turning the economy around, so he took the extraordinary step of criminalizing private ownership of gold as one of the steps to decouple the precious metal from the nation’s currency.

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