Nelson Bunker Hunt, who died Tuesday at the age of 88, didn't fit the standard image of a Texas oil tycoon. He wore ill-fitting suits and thick spectacles, drove an old car, flew economy class and neither drank nor smoked. But when it came to politics, his staunch ultra-right views fit right in.
They also played a key role in blowing up a sizable chunk of the multi-billion-dollar fortune left by family patriarch H.L. Hunt, a wildcatter who struck it rich in the east Texas oil fields in the 1930s.
Bunker Hunt (he preferred his middle name) is best-known for a disastrous scheme to corner the silver market. When it all unravelled in March, 1980, ending in the metal's crash on March 27 (known as Silver Thursday in market lore), he and younger brother William Herbert Hunt were stuck with $1.7-billion (U.S.) in trading losses and soon would face federal civil charges of illegal manipulation, as well as a slew of costly lawsuits from irate investors. Before the decade was out, both were bankrupt.
It's a perfect example of what can happen when a billionaire with strong political opinions thinks his money and ideology equip him with some sort of special insight into the workings of the economy that mere mortals with thinner bank accounts fail to grasp.
And we're seeing it play out again today, with the continuing furore in conservative business and political circles over government deficit spending and successive rounds of quantitative easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve.
Never mind that the fiscal and monetary stimulus was vital to rescue the faltering economy from the jaws of recession in the wake of the global financial meltdown. Or that the inflation these critics have been expecting for the past six years has yet to materialize. The ideological hardliners simply refuse to acknowledge that they are wrong and the Keynesians were right.
Which is exactly where Mr. Hunt, who inherited his extreme views and disdain for meddlesome politicians and regulators from his father (both were heavy donors to right-wing causes and committed members of the John Birch Society), stood in the 1970s.
Mr. Hunt became convinced that the rampant U.S. inflation of the 1970s, stoked by what he regarded as disastrous monetary policy (he was right about that) and political interference from liberal Democrats, would shred his wealth. He also saw at work the evil machinations of Communists bent on destroying capitalism.
The only reasonable safeguard was to load up on hard assets, so he began buying up even more oil properties, land, racehorses, cattle, coal, sugar beets, art and coins and made huge bets on commodity futures.
He started accumulating silver as an inflation hedge in the early 1970s, drawn to the precious metal by its relatively low price ($1.94 an ounce), growing industrial value and the fact the public was barred from owning gold at the time.
But it quickly became an obsession. When paper money turned worthless, as it surely must, he and his family would be sitting on the world's biggest hoard of silver, which would soar in value. Silver prices edged close to $50 and people began scouring their cupboards for any silverware they could sell.
But the Hunts' best-laid plans came undone after Paul Volcker, the new Fed chief appointed by Jimmy Carter, one of those Democrats Mr. Hunt loathed, jacked up interest rates in his successful assault on inflation.
In 1967, H.L. Hunt wrote a peculiar political novel called Alpaca, in which he sketched a Dallas billionaire's vision of Utopia. His version of the perfect democracy would give the largest number of votes to the wealthiest, oldest and most ambitious citizens – two each to taxpayers in the top tax brackets.
But the evidence suggests that today's like-minded rich ideologues, who are spending millions to advance their pet political causes, should be getting fewer votes at the ballot box, not more.