When Will Silver Top Its Hunt Brothers High? It’s Complicated
As silver prices approach their record highs, the question arises: what exactly is the record high?
For silver, the answer isn’t straightforward. The precious metal’s all-time high was set in early 1980, when the Hunt Brothers’ attempt to corner the market propelled prices higher. It is one of only a small handful of markets whose record highs from the commodity spikes of the 1970s and 1980s have yet to be surpassed.
Precisely what price was reached in January 1980, before the exchanges began to intervene to defuse the squeeze, depends on which market you’re looking at. In the London market — generally cited as the global benchmark by analysts and journalists — precious metals trade continually in an over-the-counter market, but benchmark prices are set in a daily auction. The record silver auction price was set on Jan. 18, 1980, at $49.45 an ounce.
Bloomberg was unable to obtain intraday price data for the London market for that period, and a spokesperson for the London Bullion Market Association didn’t have the data either. In intraday price data for the London market starting in 1993, the record high of $49.8044 was set on Apr. 25, 2011.
On New York’s Comex, the 1980 record high was also set on Jan. 18, 1980. A spokesperson for CME Group, which now owns Comex, said the record high was $50.35, although contemporaneous market data published in the New York Times puts it at $50.36, as does a 1982 Securities and Exchange Commission report on the silver crisis.
On the Chicago Board of Trade, where silver futures also traded at the time (the contract no longer exists), silver traded as high as $52.50 on Jan. 21, 1980, according to market data published in the New York Times.
Source : Bloomberg
