How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

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Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher
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Prologue

Since the 2019 Copa Libertadores final, I have been feeling a improvement of interest in South American football in soccer. I really enjoy when fans from all-over the continents show up to comment Copa Libertadores, Copa Sudamericana or even Brazilian League games. It’s quite nice, because South American football fans already use to follow the big European Leagues, and in some cases competitions like MLS and Liga MX, which are both broadcasted in cable television.
In the same time, I am looking to improve my English. I still struggle with the language, mainly when I try to write something. As a History teacher, writing is an important exercise for me, and I have the goal to develop this ability in this year. Since I joined Reddit, this sub is being one of the main plataforms to improve my knowledge in reading and writing skills.
These two factors motivated me to create this thread. I want to give more information about Brazilian football, and since a while there is a few Brazilian users providing some awesome content for this community. I particularly mention u/majinmattossj2 , who posted an incredible series about the Brazilian "Big 12"”, explaining in details the history of the biggest clubs in our country.
In this thread, I look for give some historic context and then point the big clubs of our country state-by-state, distinguishing big national clubs from big regional clubs from big local clubs, but reinforcing the importance of this second and third groups of clubs to Brazilian football, mainly because I always have been a fan of lower leagues from everywhere, and I guess this sub has a lot of people like me.
That being said, I apologize for the many English mistakes that will be find in this thread and give my cheers for everyone who wants to read it.

Introduction – The importance of state leagues

Is maybe somewhat hard for football fans from all-over the world understanding the Brazilian football calendar, but to fully understand our context, our footballing culture and even why this sports is so widespread and succesfull here it’s necessary understaing the regionalized structure of the sport. About a third of our season is composed by State Leagues, competitions played by every single club in Brazil. These tournments can be also quite long. Just to give an example, the last Campeonato Paulista (São Paulo State League), was played by 16 clubs (5 from Série A, 3 from Série B, 1 from Série C, 3 from Série D and 4 not placed in national divisions) and took 16 fixtures just before the start of national leagues. There is a total of 27 states in Brazil, and every single one has their state league. In some cases those leagues has several local divisions. States like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo has 4 state divisions in their system and clubs placed in national divisions are not protected of relegation in their local leagues.
State leagues are still quite important for the majority of Brazilian clubs and also somewhat important for the biggest ones. State Leagues are the oldest football tournments in the country and are all about tradition. No one wants to lose the control of their own ground against a local rival. And those kind of hierarchies are built year after year in the state disputes. Despite those competitions have being losing prestigie among fans of the biggest clubs in the country, many people claim that the state leagues are the true soul of Brazilian football. The vast majority of the professional clubs just play those competitions, and many turn inactive along the second semester of the season. State leagues represent the opportunity of countryside or neighborhood teams face powerful sides like Flamengo, Palmeiras, Grêmio or Atlético Mineiro. It’s also the opportunity to the smaller clubs to show their talents and sell players for the big ones. No less importante, is the opportunity for small clubs to qualify for Copa do Brazil (Brazil Cup) and national leagues (Série D, the last national division, is composed by the best placed no-divisional teams from every State League).
But my key point here is enphasize that state leagues are the Golden chance for clubs from the vast majority of the states to have a trophy in the season. Is really important to take account that just 7 of the 27 states have national league titles, and 48 of the 63 national championships were won by teams from Rio de Janeiro or São Paulo states, the other 15 being conquered by clubs from 5 different states. However, a plenty of teams that never faced any national glories are powerful sides in their local leagues and because of this has large and faithful fanbases. These clubs are not considered big nationwide, but are certainly big in their own homegrounds. And what make this clubs big is the titles their obtain. This means a lot in a vast and diverse country like Brazil. The country area is 8.516.000 km² (10 times bigger than Ukraine, the largest European country apart of Russia) and the nation population is 210 million (the twice of Germany, the most populated European country, again apart of Russia and Turkey). In this scenario, local disputes are key ones, even because there is no place for every region to dispute Séries A or B, and took national titles.
Just to give an example, ABC (the team name is actually this, because they honoured an agrément between Argentina, Brazil and Chile) has the national record of state league titles, 56 in the Rio Grande do Norte State League. Their fans are numerous and noisy in the city of Natal, but this season they failed to promote to Série C. ABC also played in just 15 seasons of Série A (most of those when the national league had a regional qualifiyng system) and their only national glory is the 2010 Série C title. A club like this is not by any means considered a national big, but they have a strong historic importance in the country, and are certainly a state big club, being always well respected by football fans all over Brazil.
The national Big 12 clubs in Brazil are the big clubs from the four richest states in terms of GDP. São Paulo is by far the richest and most industrialized Brazilian state, and their local Big 4 (Palmeiras, Corinthians, São Paulo and Santos) won 31 national league titles, with another single national title being conquered by São Paulo countryside club Guarani, who curiously has never have won São Paulo state league. Rio de Janeiro is the second richest state, their Big 4 (Flamengo, Vasco, Fluminense and Botafogo) have won 16 national league titles. Minas Gerais is the third richest state and their local big clubs (Atlético Mineiro and Cruzeiro) has 5 national league titles. Rio Grande do Sul cames next in terms of GDP, and their big clubs (Internacional and Grêmio) also has 5 league titles. This clubs make theirself big in their local competitions, and were alreadywell established as power local sides when national competitions started to be disputed in 1959.
Unsurprisingly, the other clubs that have won Brazilian League came from another important economic regions. Paraná state has two national titles, one each conquered by their local big 2 (Coritiba and Atlético Paranaense) and has also the 5th biggest GDP in Brazil. Bahia has two titles with EC Bahia, and the 7th biggest GDP. Pernambuco state has one single title conquered by Sport Recife, and the 10th biggest GDP in the country. However, when it turns to total population Bahia and Pernambuco are respectively the 5th and 7th biggest states in the country.
It’s also important look for the other side of the coin. In Séries A, B and C, just one club (Confiança) came from the 7 poorest states in terms of GDP. None club from the 15 poorest states play in Série A. A total of 13 states has no clubs in Séries A and B this season and 9 of those has also no representants in current Série C. This, however, doesn’t mean there is no local important clubs in such regions. State professional leagues are played in all those states and many of them has local big clubs.
I pretend post a brief history of Brazilian National League on the next weeks. For now, I just want to ratify that state leagues are far older than national competitions and the national Big 12 is actually composed by the big sides from the state leagues of the four richest states. The concept of Big 12 is itself contested by fans of clubs like Atlético Paranaense or Bahia (from relevant rich states, but not the most economic powerful ones), whom had also won national league titles and frequently are better placed in the league than any of clubs from Big 12, in some cases through several seasons.
National League was itself originally built as an extension of State Leagues. The first editions of the tournment (1959 to 1966) were no more than a cup competition consisted by state champions. Between 1967 and 1970, National League was actually a competition disputed by teams from the 4 richest states, plus a couple of invited teams from another secondary economic centres. Just in 1971, when our national team had already three World Cup titles, the modern version of National League, with a division system incluiding clubs from all the states, was disputed for the first time. Due reasons like huge travel distance and poor transport structure, inter-state games are uncommon before 1959, and actually even before 1971. Also, the four richest states are all concentrated in the Centre-South zone, where most of industries and richest companies of the country are placed since the XIX century, turning everything even harder to North and Northeastern clubs.
After this explanation about the concept of big clubs in Brazil, I will present a list with basic information pointing the big clubs state-by-state, dividing states in six groups according a personal criteria: “The Axis” (Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo states), “Regional Giants” (Rio Grande do Sul and Minas Gerais), “Non-Big12 Best” (Paraná, Bahia, Pernambuco), “Top Divisions Local Big Clubs” (Goiás, Ceará, Santa Catarina), “Lower Divisions Local Big Clubs” (Pará, Paraíba, Alagoas, Rio Grande do Norte, Sergipe and Maranhão) and “D-Side Big Clubs” (Mato Grosso do Sul, Mato Grosso, Espírito Santo, Distrito Federal, Piauí, Amapá, Tocantins, Amazonas, Rondônia, Roraima and Acre).
Due limit of charachters reasons, this post will be a series in three parts: Part 1 - Prologue, Introduction, The Axis and Regional Giants Part 2 - Non-Big 12 Best and Top Division Local Big Clubs Part 3 - Lower Division Local Big Clubs and D-Side Clubs

The Axis

There is big clubs and BIG clubs. In Brazilian case, the most well supported, the richest, the most victorious, the most internationally famous and the most media covered are from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro states. Im not pointing that the four big clubs from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are all of them bigger than the other ones from Big12, but clubs from those states combined a large amount of national titles, they’ve won 48 of the 63 Leagues including the last 5. They also had won 11 of the 19 Brazilian titles in Copa Libertadores. Those clubs are actually from neighbor states, where the two biggest cities in the country are located, the states that media covers day-by-day, not just in terms of sports, but also in terms of economy and politics. Key politicians or cultural figures in many times came from Rio and São Paulo. Those two cities (consequently, those two states) were also the first ones to establish football competition, in the late XIX century.
Clubs from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo are always nationally broadcasted, has national fanbases spread in all the states (Im no different, I support Flamengo but not from Rio) and, as you can imagine, many fans complain about some advantages for them in terms of TV contracts, CBF decisions or even refs help. This is why Rio and São Paulo are many times called “The Axis” by fans from outside those states.
São Paulo Corinthians, São Paulo, Palmeiras and Santos are considered the Big 4 in São Paulo state. The first three are based in São Paulo city, the last one in the coastal city of Santos. Among the São Paulo Big 4, there is no consensus about whom is the biggest. Every single one has their arguments.
Corinthians has the biggest fanbase (the second biggest nationwide, with estimated 28,3 million fans), and the biggest number of state league titles (30). They also won 7 Brazilian League titles, 3 Copa do Brasil, 1 Copa Libertadores and 2 FIFA Club World Cup (they played 2000 edition, hosted in Brazil, as 1999 Brazilian Champions).
São Paulo FC fanbase is estimated in 17,1 million fans. They have won 21 São Paulo State titles, 6 Brazilian Leagues, 3 Copa Libertadores, 3 Intercontinental Cup/FIFA Club World Cups and 1 Copa Sudamericana.
Palmeiras fanbase is estimated in 13,1 million fans. They have won 23 São Paulo State titles, 10 Brazilian Leagues (record), 3 Copa do Brasil and 1 Copa Libertadores.
Santos fanbase is estimated in 5,5 million fans. They have won 22 São Paulo State titles, 8 Brazilian Leagues, 1 Copa do Brasil, 3 Copa Libertadores and 2 Interncontinental Cups. They also had the squad generally considered the greatest ever in Brazilian football history, Pelé’s generation, the best team in the world among the late 1950s and early1960s.
Also, being the biggest state of Brazil in terms of population and economy, São Paulo state normally has a plenty of clubs spread in the national divisions. There is a lot of traditional sides such Guarani, Ponte Preta, Bragantino, Portuguesa, São Caetano, Santo André or Paulista that had great seasons in Série A or Copa do Brasil. This clubs are not considered big ones in the state, but they are actually more powerful than most of the clubs that will be mentioned in this thread.
Rio de Janeiro Botafogo, Flamengo, Fluminense and Vasco da Gama are considered the Big 4 in Rio de Janeiro state. I don’t want to be a jerk with my rivals, but Flamengo tooks advantage in this state in terms of local, national and international titles. It has also the biggest fanbase of those by far and currently face a ways better situation in terms of squad power and finances. However, Vasco, Fluminense and Botafogo are really historic and big clubs.
Flamengo has the biggest fanbase in Brazil, estimated in 37,9 million fans. The club have won 36 Rio de Janeiro state titles, 7 Brazilian Leagues (1987 title is not recognized by CBF), 3 Copa do Brasil, 2 Copa Libertadores and 1 Intercontinental Cup.
Vasco da Gama fanbase is estimated in 9,6 million fans. They have won 24 Rio de Janeiro state titles, 4 Brazilian Leagues, 1 Copa do Brasil and 1 Copa Libertadores.
Fluminense fanbase is estimated in 2,9 million fans. They have won 31 Rio de Janeiro state titles, 4 Brazilian Leagues and 1 Copa do Brasil.
Botafogo fanbase is as well estimated in 2,8 million fans. They have won 21 Rio de Janeiro state titles and 2 Brazilian Leagues.

Regional Giants

As mentioned before, there is big clubs and BIG clubs. The big two from Minas Gerais (Atlético Mineiro and Cruzeiro) and Rio Grande do Sul (Internacional and Grêmio) are BIG ones. However, they are not based in the main economic centre of the country. This is not say their states are not powerful and influent, it’s just point that they are not exactly in placed in the main debates of the country. They don’t use to have as many national broadcasts as their counterparts from Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, also their fanbase is not nationwide spread as the Axis ones. However, even if most of its fans came from their own states, Atlético Mineiro, Cruzeiro, Internacional and Grêmio have a long-term undisputable tradition of glories. They are not simply big clubs, they are giants. Those clubs tend to perform better in Cup competitions, like Copa do Brasil and Copa Libertadores. Many times they struggle in the league by factors lower TV rights (of course in comparsion as Axis clubs), bigger distance of travel, and lower budget. However, the big sides of Minas Gerais and Rio Grande do Sul states has more titles than Rio de Janeiro’s clubs in cup competitions, and use to focus in it along the season.
Minas Gerais Atlético Mineiro and Cruzeiro are considered the big sides in Minas Gerais. Both have its argument to claim theirselves as the biggest, but in terms of national and international titles, Cruzeiro has more glories. Anyways, the “Raposa” is right now struggling in Brazilian Série B, meanwhile Atlético Mineiro is fighting for Série A title. América Mineiro) deserves a special mention as “local big” as they have won 16 Minas Gerais state titles and frequently play in Série A, but they are far from the Big 12 group.
Atlético Mineiro fanbase is estimated in 5 million fans. They have won 45 Minas Gerais state titles, 1 Brazilian League, 1 Brazilian Cup and 1 Copa Libertadores.
Cruzeiro fanbase is estimated in 7,2 million fans. They have won 38 Minas Gerais state titles, 4 Brazilian Leagues, 6 Copa do Brasil (record) and 2 Copa Libertadores.
Rio Grande do Sul Internacional and Grêmio are considered the big sides in Rio Grande do Sul. Again, there is no consensus about who rules the state. The state derby, known as “Grenal” is often considered the most hatred rivalry in Brazil. Almost everyone has a side in Rio Grande do Sul, even if they doesn’t properly like football. Both are from Porto Alegre, but the rivalry is really well spread all over the state. Even the countryside of the stat is deeply divided in blue and red.
Internacional fanbase is estimated in 6,4 million fans. They have won 45 Rio Grande do Sul state titles, 3 Brazilian Leagues, 1 Copa do Brasil, 2 Copa Libertadores, 1 FIFA Club World Cup and 1 Copa Sudamericana, being also the only Brazilian club that have won all the current major competitions.
Grêmio fanbase is estimated in 8 million fans. They have won 39 Rio Grande do Sul state titles, 2 Brazilian Leagues, 5 Copa do Brasil, 3 Copa Libertadores and 1 Intercontinental Cup.
Edit: some data correction

What happened last week in the stock market? What are the next interesting earnings reports? Let’s talk about the stock market!
Hey everyone and Welcome so let’s start with the recap of what has happened in the stock market since Monday.
Monday the DOW rose by more than 1,12% with the broad stock market SP500 also gaining more than half a percent while the NASDAQ was the laggard barely up 0,2% to finish the day while The VIX had another big drop closing at 22.2. About 70% of the companies were gaining while 80% were trading over 50 and 200-day moving averages. The stock market was lead by the energy sector, which saw a major spike of almost 5% with Financials and Industrials also up more than 1% for the day. The rally was pushed mostly by small and mid-cap value stocks while large-cap growth companies were lagging as you can see in this HEAT MAP with the biggest company in the world, Apple, dragging down the sector, down almost 3% for the day. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
Reports also came in on Monday that the PS5 and the new xBox have been sold out the moment they are available in stock, as the two gaming consoles are enjoying great demand, this bolds well for the parent companies Sony and Microsoft especially if they can keep up with the demand for this holiday season including Black Friday, holiday RETAIL SALES are forecasted to rise between 3,6 and 5,2%. XBOX & PS5 NEWS
All this while Europe will start to re-open again after a contraction of the economy due to the latest lockdowns. As they saw the Eurozone PMI falling by almost 4% in October. EUROZONE NEWS
Some good news came from STORE CAPITAL as the rent collections for November remained at 90% with no new tenants requiring deferrals, this suggests that companies are managing to survive even with the current restrictions in place.
We also saw reports that Janet Yellen will be the next Treasury pick as she would become the first person to be at the top of the FED the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury and she will become the first woman to lead the Treasury. TREASURY NEWS
Moving on, Tuesday we saw the DOW spike more than 1,5%, the SP500 rising 1,6% and the NASDAQ up more than 1,3% in what was a very good day for the stock market with more than 70% of companies advancing and 167 new highs on above average volume. The leaders were once again Energy and Financials, as this 2 sectors, will be two of the fastest benefiting from the end of the pandemic. The rally was continued with value companies leading the way for the 2nd straight day. You can struggle to find red spots in the HEAT MAP from Tuesday but there were a few in healthcare and real estate. This was the first time that the DOW closed over 30k. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
NIKOLA stock tumbled after the recent rally as the GM deal seems less likely every day, as the deadline for the deal is December 3rd.
While October HOME SEARCHES surged over 200% as a Redfin report shows, this leads me to believe that the strong housing demand will keep remaining at this levels for a good period of time.
On Wednesday we saw the stock market take a breather, as the DOW lost 0,6%, the SP500 lost 0,16% while the pandemic plays regained some momentum with the NASDAQ being up almost half a percent before the stock market closed for Thanksgiving.
About 54% of companies were losing ground with below average volume for the day, as Technology and consumer discretionary and staples were the gainers for the day. Value plays did see some normal corrections after the huge gains in the last days as investors were cashing out some money probably before the day off. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
Here is the HEAT MAP from Wednesday as only a couple of companies Like Amazon, Apple, Nvidia and Shopify were gaining, while the energy sector was the biggest laggard.
Also the AAII investor sentiment SURVEY from Wednesday showed that people are getting more bearish or bullish as the neutral feeling fell way below the historical average as bullishness remains very high. This is usually a contrarian indicator, as more bullishness gives me reason to take profits and bearishness to invest in the stock market, though I don’t have the same confidence in this as in the past, as I expect this market rally to last until the end of next year.
News came in from Delta Airlines as pilots approved pay cuts and lower guaranteed hours that could avoid more than 1700 pilots getting cut off. This are great news both for the company and the pilots, as air travel will pick up again in the next years. DELTA NEWS
Also, Deere reported blowout EARNINGS and a beat of more than 1$ per share and a revenue only 0,6% below last year while also issuing strong 2021 forecasts as they see the equipment sales climbing more than 10% compared to 2020 with a strong net income guidance of 3,6 to 4 billion $ compared to the May guidance of 1,6 to 2 billion $. 4Q 2020 / 2021
We closed the week on a short day on Friday as the NASDAQ led the way up 0,93%, the SP500 up 0,24% and the DOW barely up 0,13%. As we saw about 55% of the companies advancing on way below average volume due to the short day of trading with 85% of companies trading below average volumes. Friday was a pretty divided day as Health Care and Tech lead the way while Utilities and Energy saw a slight pullback after the big gains this week. SECTORS / CHART /
Here is the HEAT MAP from Friday as we see that the market was dragged higher by the big tech companies and communication services while the rest of the market was pretty much lagging.
So for the week, the Nasdaq lead the way up 3% and closed at the 45th record of 2020, the SP followed up 2,3% and closed a 26th record of the year with the DOW also rising 2% in this shortened week. While the VIX closed the week just below 21, at the lowest level since February.
So great signs for the recovery of the economy still popped up almost every day, as the stock market is more forward looking than it is a reflection of the current economic conditions. As November will likely be the 7th straight month of job gains, though they will be the fewest in number since the recovery of jobs has begun. NOVEMBER JOBS
Also, Bitcoin has seen its price drop from almost all-time highs at 19,5k down more than 3k before bouncing back to around 17k. The cryptocurrency was due for a correction as it had seen a huge rally in since Labor Day and this correction came as news popped of the Treasury attempting to rush out regulation on crypto-wallets. This would be a big negative factor for people who own Bitcoin not for just it’s value but for using it also. But we will have to wait and see as the Treasury boss will be replaced when the Presidency changes. BITCOIN NEWS / BITCOIN CHART
Some company news from Friday were that PALANTIR saw it’s stock plunge from all time high of 33,5$ to 27,6$ after Citron tweeted that they are shorting the stock with a 20$ price target. This are common tactics that short sellers use in my opinion to get the fast results they expected. Citron also got into a short position on NIO recently and that news also made the stock take a plunged but that has since recovered and even made new all time highs since.
Great news came for sports betting companies like DraftKings and Penn national as Canada seems to be going the same way as the US as legalizing sports betting advances more and more. CANADA NEWS
Also, Tesla has seen a huge spike in the last weeks since the SP500 news, and the stock might see another spike as Musk TWEETED that the full self-driving feature will be released wider in the next weeks as the company finally approaches the end of software development as they collect more and more data. Tesla has surpassed Berkshire and is now the 6th largest company in the US as the stock is up more than 600% year to date making Elon Musk the second richest person in the world behind only Bezos. The company will go into the SP500 index at about 80% of its total market value cap as the index only counts the free-floating shares. I believe we won’t see such a big spike in price when the company will be added to the SP in December, just like it happened with the stock split its more of a buy the news sell the event type of thing. As I expected the stock jumped over the previous all time highs and it might see a little correction when the event actually happens, but in the long run this a company that I will continue to own in my portfolio. TESLA CHART / MUSK WEALTH /
Next week we will have some interesting earnings reports that I expect to beat the estimates from companies like NEXT WEEK EARNINGS
AUTOHOME which is a company that has great potential as it trades at a low P/E, they offer leads and services for auto consumers in China and they have a very wide consumer base to spread to.
With ZOOM also expecting to report on Monday after the close, I recently just sold out of my position in Zoom. I think there is too much positive expectations for the company as it trade at almost 200 times earnings per shares.
Also, Salesforce are expected to announce earnings on Tuesday, as the company saw it’s stock tumble after the news of a possible acquiring of Slack. In the long run that will be a very good play for the company as they have continued to buy more and more companies that allows them to keep growing.
Other companies that are reporting and are very interesting to watch are CrowdStrike and OKTA also on Tuesday with DocuSign , Dollar General, Marvell and Snowflake reporting on Wednesday.
Good news came this Saturday for online retailers as sales jumped more than 20% on Black Friday and are expected to grow between 15 and 35% tomorrow as Cyber Monday may set a new record for online sales. RETAIL EXPECTATIONS
Here are the most important economic data that we are looking for in the next week as it will be a week full of numbers that may impact how the stock market reacts in the near future. Hopefully we will see an improvement in PMI and a decrease in jobless claims and many more improvments. NEXT WEEK ECONOMIC DATA
Thank you everyone for reading! Hope you enjoyed the content! Be sure to leave a comment down below with your opinion and other thoughts on the stock market!
Have a great and see you next time!

PsychoMarket Recap - Thursday, January 28, 2021
Stocks rose today, with the indices shaking of yesterday’s decline after new economic data showed a larger dip in new unemployment claims than expected. Each of the S&P 500, Dow and Nasdaq gained more than 1% intraday on Thursday after logging their biggest drops since October on Wednesday.
Weekly unemployment dipped below 900,000 for the first time in three weeks, with claims pulling back by almost 70,000 compared to last week. However, new unemployment claims remain at a historically high level when compared to pre-pandemic levels. Other economic data disappointed, however. US gross domestic product (GDP) grew for the second straight quarter, albeit with slowing momentum. All told, the US economy contracted at a 3.5% annualized rate in 2020, for the biggest drop in GDP since 1946.
Earnings season has also been chugging along, and shares of some heavily weighted companies that reported results after the closing bell on Wednesday dipped. Tesla’s (TSLA) stock dropped more than 5% after the company posted profit that fell short of estimates, though revenue hit a quarterly record of more than $10 billion. Apple’s (AAPL) stock fell after CEO Tim Cook said during the company’s earnings call that he expected a second-quarter deceleration in wearables and services sales growth, overshadowing fiscal first-quarter revenue and earnings that topped expectations. Facebook (FB) shares gained, however, after the company topped user growth, sales and profit estimates, but warned about “significant uncertainty” over the ad environment in 2021 amid the pandemic.
The frenzy over Gamestop (GME) has led TD Ameritrade, Robinhood, Interactive Broker, any other brokerages to freeze any new purchases of stocks that are popular in Reddit (GME, BB, NOK, AMC just to name a few). The response has been swift. Retail traders have taken to social media to voice their anger and politicians from both sides of the aisles have publicly criticized Robinhood for restricting an investor’s right to buy. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., who also sits on that committee, said she would support a hearing if necessary, condemning Robinhood’s move as “unacceptable.” Sen. Ted Cruz, a conservative Republican from Texas, seized on Robinhood’s branding in a post Thursday morning on Twitter. Using a bemused face emoji, Cruz posted a March 2016 tweet from Robinhood declaring, “Let the people trade,” alongside its statement announcing restrictions on GameStop and AMC. Even Elon Musk, Tesla CEO and the richest person in the world has publicly supported the retail traders. Truly we have never seen anything like this in the market and will be paying close attention to how the situation unfolds. There is now a class-action lawsuit against Robinhood filed in the Southern District of New York that claims that Robinhood “purposefully, willfully, and knowingly removed the stock ‘GME’ [GameStop] from its trading platform in the midst of an unprecedented stock rise thereby depriving retail investors of the ability to invest in the open-market and manipulating the open-market.” Shares of GME, AMC and other “meme stocks” pulled back sharply today.
Highlights

• Webull, another popular broker, maintained trading of GME and other stocks open
• After earnings, (AAPL) with a host of target increases by analysts. Consensus price target around $170 at Buy. Stock currently around $142
• Abbott Labs (ABT) with a host of target raises. Consensus price target around $130 at Overweight. Stock currently around $114
• Automatic Data Processing (ADP) target raised by Wells Fargo from $200 to $205 at Overweight. Stock currently around $165
• Chewy (CHWY) target raised by Wells Fargo from $100 to $120 at Overweight. Stock currently around $104
• Facebook (FB) with a host of price target raises. Consensus price target around $350 at Outperform. Stock currently around $272
• Alphabet (GOOG) target raised by Wells Fargo from $1800 to $2100 at Overweight. Stock currently around $1818
• Pinterest (PINS) target raised by Wells Fargo from $75 to $85 at Overweight. Stock currently around $64
• STMicroelectronics (STM) target raised by Craig Hallum from $46 to $48 at Buy. Stock currently around $37
• Xilinix (XLNX) target raised by Cowen from $120 to $153 at Outpeform . Stock currently around $134

Greed is not a financial issue. It's a heart issues” - Andy Stanley

Story Time: Silver short squeeze

How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost it All

TL:DR: yes its long. Grab a beer.

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Until his dying day in 2014, Nelson Bunker Hunt, who had once been the world’s wealthiest man, denied that he and his brother plotted to corner the global silver market.
Sure, back in 1980, Bunker, his younger brother Herbert, and other members of the Hunt clan owned roughly two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. But the historic stockpiling of bullion hadn’t been a ploy to manipulate the market, they and their sizable legal team would insist in the following years. Instead, it was a strategy to hedge against the voracious inflation of the 1970s—a monumental bet against the U.S. dollar.
Whatever the motive, it was a bet that went historically sour. The debt-fueled boom and bust of the global silver market not only decimated the Hunt fortune, but threatened to take down the U.S. financial system.
The panic of “Silver Thursday” took place over 35 years ago, but it still raises questions about the nature of financial manipulation. While many view the Hunt brothers as members of a long succession of white collar crooks, from Charles Ponzi to Bernie Madoff, others see the endearingly eccentric Texans as the victims of overstepping regulators and vindictive insiders who couldn’t stand the thought of being played by a couple of southern yokels.
In either case, the story of the Hunt brothers just goes to show how difficult it can be to distinguish illegal market manipulation from the old fashioned wheeling and dealing that make our markets work.
The Real-Life Ewings
Whatever their foibles, the Hunts make for an interesting cast of characters. Evidently CBS thought so; the family is rumored to be the basis for the Ewings, the fictional Texas oil dynasty of Dallas fame.
Sitting at the top of the family tree was H.L. Hunt, a man who allegedly purchased his first oil field with poker winnings and made a fortune drilling in east Texas. H.L. was a well-known oddball to boot, and his sons inherited many of their father’s quirks.
For one, there was the stinginess. Despite being the richest man on earth in the 1960s, Bunker Hunt (who went by his middle name), along with his younger brothers Herbert (first name William) and Lamar, cultivated an image as unpretentious good old boys. They drove old Cadillacs, flew coach, and when they eventually went to trial in New York City in 1988, they took the subway. As one Texas editor was quoted in the New York Times, Bunker Hunt was “the kind of guy who orders chicken-fried steak and Jello-O, spills some on his tie, and then goes out and buys all the silver in the world.”
Cheap suits aside, the Hunts were not without their ostentation. At the end of the 1970s, Bunker boasted a stable of over 500 horses and his little brother Lamar owned the Kansas City Chiefs. All six children of H.L.’s first marriage (the patriarch of the Hunt family had fifteen children by three women before he died in 1974) lived on estates befitting the scions of a Texas billionaire. These lifestyles were financed by trusts, but also risky investments in oil, real estate, and a host of commodities including sugar beets, soybeans, and, before long, silver.
The Hunt brothers also inherited their father’s political inclinations. A zealous anti-Communist, Bunker Hunt bankrolled conservative causes and was a prominent member of the John Birch Society, a group whose founder once speculated that Dwight Eisenhower was a “dedicated, conscious agent” of Soviet conspiracy. In November of 1963, Hunt sponsored a particularly ill-timed political campaign, which distributed pamphlets around Dallas condemning President Kennedy for alleged slights against the Constitution on the day that he was assassinated. JFK conspiracy theorists have been obsessed with Hunt ever since.
In fact, it was the Hunt brand of politics that partially explains what led Bunker and Herbert to start buying silver in 1973.
Hard Money
The 1970s were not kind to the U.S. dollar.
Years of wartime spending and unresponsive monetary policy pushed inflation upward throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. Then, in October of 1973, war broke out in the Middle East and an oil embargo was declared against the United States. Inflation jumped above 10%. It would stay high throughout the decade, peaking in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution at an annual average of 13.5% in 1980.
Over the same period of time, the global monetary system underwent a historic transformation. Since the first Roosevelt administration, the U.S. dollar had been pegged to the value of gold at a predictable rate of $35 per ounce. But in 1971, President Nixon, responding to inflationary pressures, suspended that relationship. For the first time in modern history, the paper dollar did not represent some fixed amount of tangible, precious metal sitting in a vault somewhere.
For conservative commodity traders like the Hunts, who blamed government spending for inflation and held grave reservations about the viability of fiat currency, the perceived stability of precious metal offered a financial safe harbor. It was illegal to trade gold in the early 1970s, so the Hunts turned to the next best thing.
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Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics; chart by Priceonomics

As an investment, there was a lot to like about silver. The Hunts were not alone in fleeing to bullion amid all the inflation and geopolitical turbulence, so the price was ticking up. Plus, light-sensitive silver halide is a key component of photographic film. With the growth of the consumer photography market, new production from mines struggled to keep up with demand.
And so, in 1973, Bunker and Herbert bought over 35 million ounces of silver, most of which they flew to Switzerland in specifically designed airplanes guarded by armed Texas ranch hands. According to one source, the Hunt’s purchases were big enough to move the global market.
But silver was not the Hunts' only speculative venture in the 1970s. Nor was it the only one that got them into trouble with regulators.
Soy Before Silver
In 1977, the price of soybeans was rising fast. Trade restrictions on Brazil and growing demand from China made the legume a hot commodity, and both Bunker and Herbert decided to enter the futures market in April of that year.
A future is an agreement to buy or sell some quantity of a commodity at an agreed upon price at a later date. If someone contracts to buy soybeans in the future (they are said to take the “long” position), they will benefit if the price of soybeans rise, since they have locked in the lower price ahead of time. Likewise, if someone contracts to sell (that’s called the “short” position), they benefit if the price falls, since they have locked in the old, higher price.
While futures contracts can be used by soybean farmers and soy milk producers to guard against price swings, most futures are traded by people who wouldn’t necessarily know tofu from cream cheese. As a de facto insurance contract against market volatility, futures can be used to hedge other investments or simply to gamble on prices going up (by going long) or down (by going short).
When the Hunts decided to go long in the soybean futures market, they went very, very long. Between Bunker, Herbert, and the accounts of five of their children, the Hunts collectively purchased the right to buy one-third of the entire autumn soybean harvest of the United States.
To some, it appeared as if the Hunts were attempting to corner the soybean market.
In its simplest version, a corner occurs when someone buys up all (or at least, most) of the available quantity of a commodity. This creates an artificial shortage, which drives up the price, and allows the market manipulator to sell some of his stockpile at a higher profit.
Futures markets introduce some additional complexity to the cornerer’s scheme. Recall that when a trader takes a short position on a contract, he or she is pledging to sell a certain amount of product to the holder of the long position. But if the holder of the long position just so happens to be sitting on all the readily available supply of the commodity under contract, the short seller faces an unenviable choice: go scrounge up some of the very scarce product in order to “make delivery” or just pay the cornerer a hefty premium and nullify the deal entirely.
In this case, the cornerer is actually counting on the shorts to do the latter, says Craig Pirrong, professor of finance at the University of Houston. If too many short sellers find that it actually costs less to deliver the product, the market manipulator will be stuck with warehouses full of inventory. Finance experts refer to selling the all the excess supply after building a corner as “burying the corpse.”
“That is when the price collapses,” explains Pirrong. “But if the number of deliveries isn’t too high, the loss from selling at the low price after the corner is smaller than the profit from selling contracts at the high price.”
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The Chicago Board of Trade trading floor. Photo credit: Jeremy Kemp

Even so, when the Commodity Futures Trading Commission found that a single family from Texas had contracted to buy a sizable portion of the 1977 soybean crop, they did not accuse the Hunts of outright market manipulation. Instead, noting that the Hunts had exceeded the 3 million bushel aggregate limit on soybean holdings by about 20 million, the CFTC noted that the Hunt’s “excessive holdings threaten disruption of the market and could cause serious injury to the American public.” The CFTC ordered the Hunts to sell and to pay a penalty of $500,000.
Though the Hunts made tens of millions of dollars on paper while soybean prices skyrocketed, it’s unclear whether they were able to cash out before the regulatory intervention. In any case, the Hunts were none too pleased with the decision.
“Apparently the CFTC is trying to repeal the law of supply and demand,” Bunker complained to the press.
Silver Thursday
Despite the run in with regulators, the Hunts were not dissuaded. Bunker and Herbert had eased up on silver after their initial big buy in 1973, but in the fall of 1979, they were back with a vengeance. By the end of the year, Bunker and Herbert owned 21 million ounces of physical silver each. They had even larger positions in the silver futures market: Bunker was long on 45 million ounces, while Herbert held contracts for 20 million. Their little brother Lamar also had a more “modest” position.
By the new year, with every dollar increase in the price of silver, the Hunts were making $100 million on paper. But unlike most investors, when their profitable futures contracts expired, they took delivery. As in 1973, they arranged to have the metal flown to Switzerland. Intentional or not, this helped create a shortage of the metal for industrial supply.
Naturally, the industrialists were unhappy. From a spot price of around $6 per ounce in early 1979, the price of silver shot up to $50.42 in January of 1980. In the same week, silver futures contracts were trading at $46.80. Film companies like Kodak saw costs go through the roof, while the British film producer, Ilford, was forced to lay off workers. Traditional bullion dealers, caught in a squeeze, cried foul to the commodity exchanges, and the New York jewelry house Tiffany & Co. took out a full page ad in the New York Times slamming the “unconscionable” Hunt brothers. They were right to single out the Hunts; in mid-January, they controlled 69% of all the silver futures contracts on the Commodity Exchange (COMEX) in New York.
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Source: New York Times

But as the high prices persisted, new silver began to come out of the woodwork.
“In the U.S., people rifled their dresser drawers and sofa cushions to find dimes and quarters with silver content and had them melted down,” says Pirrong, from the University of Houston. “Silver is a classic part of a bride’s trousseau in India, and when prices got high, women sold silver out of their trousseaus.”
According to a Washington Post article published that March, the D.C. police warned residents of a rash of home burglaries targeting silver.
Unfortunately for the Hunts, all this new supply had a predictable effect. Rather than close out their contracts, short sellers suddenly found it was easier to get their hands on new supplies of silver and deliver.
“The main factor that has caused corners to fail [throughout history] is that the manipulator has underestimated how much will be delivered to him if he succeeds [at] raising the price to artificial levels,” says Pirrong. “Eventually, the Hunts ran out of money to pay for all the silver that was thrown at them.”
In financial terms, the brothers had a large corpse on their hands—and no way to bury it.
This proved to be an especially big problem, because it wasn’t just the Hunt fortune that was on the line. Of the $6.6 billion worth of silver the Hunts held at the top of the market, the brothers had “only” spent a little over $1 billion of their own money. The rest was borrowed from over 20 banks and brokerage houses.
At the same time, COMEX decided to crack down. On January 7, 1980, the exchange’s board of governors announced that it would cap the size of silver futures exposure to 3 million ounces. Those in excess of the cap (say, by the tens of millions) were given until the following month to bring themselves into compliance. But that was too long for the Chicago Board of Trade exchange, which suspended the issue of any new silver futures on January 21. Silver futures traders would only be allowed to square up old contracts.
Predictably, silver prices began to slide. As the various banks and other firms that had backed the Hunt bullion binge began to recognize the tenuousness of their financial position, they issued margin calls, asking the brothers to put up more money as collateral for their debts. The Hunts, unable to sell silver lest they trigger a panic, borrowed even more. By early March, futures contracts had fallen to the mid-$30 range.
Matters finally came to a head on March 25, when one of the Hunts’ largest backers, the Bache Group, asked for $100 million more in collateral. The brothers were out of cash, and Bache was unwilling to accept silver in its place, as it had been doing throughout the month. With the Hunts in default, Bache did the only thing it could to start recouping its losses: it start to unload silver.
On March 27, “Silver Thursday,” the silver futures market dropped by a third to $10.80. Just two months earlier, these contracts had been trading at four times that amount.
The Aftermath
After the oil bust of the early 1980s and a series of lawsuits polished off the remainder of the Hunt brothers’ once historic fortune, the two declared bankruptcy in 1988. Bunker, who had been worth an estimated $16 billion in the 1960s, emerged with under $10 million to his name. That’s not exactly chump change, but it wasn’t enough to maintain his 500-plus stable of horses,.
The Hunts almost dragged their lenders into bankruptcy too—and with them, a sizable chunk of the U.S. financial system. Over twenty financial institutions had extended over a billion dollars in credit to the Hunt brothers. The default and resulting collapse of silver prices blew holes in balance sheets across Wall Street. A privately orchestrated bailout loan from a number of banks allowed the brothers to start paying off their debts and keep their creditors afloat, but the markets and regulators were rattled.
Silver Spot Prices Per Ounce (January, 1979 - June, 1980)
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Source: Trading Economics

In the words of then CFTC chief James Stone, the Hunts’ antics had threatened to punch a hole in the “financial fabric of the United States” like nothing had in decades. Writing about the entire episode a year later, Harper’s Magazine described Silver Thursday as “the first great panic since October 1929.”
The trouble was not over for the Hunts. In the following years, the brothers were dragged before Congressional hearings, got into a legal spat with their lenders, and were sued by a Peruvian mineral marketing company, which had suffered big losses in the crash. In 1988, a New York City jury found for the South American firm, levying a penalty of over $130 million against the Hunts and finding that they had deliberately conspired to corner the silver market.
Surprisingly, there is still some disagreement on that point.
Bunker Hunt attributed the whole affair to the political motives of COMEX insiders and regulators. Referring to himself later as “a favorite whipping boy” of an eastern financial establishment riddled with liberals and socialists, Bunker and his brother, Herbert, are still perceived as martyrs by some on the far-right.
“Political and financial insiders repeatedly changed the rules of the game,” wrote the New American. “There is little evidence to support the ‘corner the market’ narrative.”
Though the Hunt brothers clearly amassed a staggering amount of silver and silver derivatives at the end of the 1970s, it is impossible to prove definitively that market manipulation was in their hearts. Maybe, as the Hunts always claimed, they just really believed in the enduring value of silver.
Or maybe, as others have noted, the Hunt brothers had no idea what they were doing. Call it the stupidity defense.
“They’re terribly unsophisticated,” an anonymous associated was quoted as saying of the Hunts in a Chicago Tribune article from 1989. “They make all the mistakes most other people make,” said another.
p.s. credit to Ben Christopher

Today i have a confession to make: i'm a little bit of a minmaxer. And honestly, i think that's a pretty desirable trait in a DM. The minmaxer knows the rules, and exploits them to maximum efficiency.
"But wait, what does that have to do with spell use in society?" - someone, probably.
Well, the thing is that humans are absolutely all about minmaxing. There's a rule in the universe that reads "gas expands when hot", and suddenly we have steam engines (or something like that, i'm a political scientist not an engineer). A rule says 1+1 = 2, and suddenly we have calculus, computers and all kinds of digital stuff that runs on math. Sound is energy? Let's convert that shit into electricity, run it through a wire and turn it back into sound on the other side.
Bruh. Science is just minmaxing the laws of nature. Humanity in real life is just a big bunch of munchkins, and it should be no different in your setting.
And that is why minmaxing magic usage is something societies as a whole would do, specially with some notable spells. Today i will go in depth on how and why each of these notable mentions has a huge impact on a fantasy society.
We'll go from lowest level to highest, keeping in mind that the lower level a spell the more common it should be to find someone who has it, so often a level 2-3 spell will have more impact than a level 9 spell.
​
Mending (cantrip).
Repair anything in one minute. Your axe lost its edge? Tore your shirt? Just have someone Mend it.
Someone out there is crying "but wait! Not every village has a wizard!" and while that is true, keep in mind any High Elf knows a cantrip, as can any Variant Human.
A single "mender" could replace a lot of the work a smith, woodworker or seamstress does, freeing their time to only work on making new things rather than repair old ones.
​
Prestidigitation (cantrip).
Clean anything in six seconds. Committed axe murders until the axe got blunt, and now there's blood everywhere? Dog shit on your pillow out of spite? Someone walked all over the living room with muddy boots? Just Prestidigitate it away.
This may look like a small thing, but its actually huge when you apply it to laundry. Before washing machines were a thing housewives had to spend several hours a week washing them manually, and with Prestidigitation you can just hire someone to get it done in a few minutes.
A single "magic cleaner" can attend to several dozen homes, if not hundreds, thus freeing several hours of the time of dozens of women.
Fun fact: there's an interesting theory that says feminism only existed because of laundry machines and similar devices. Women found themselves having more free time, which they used to read and socialize. Educated women with more contacts made for easy organization of political movements, and the fact men were now able to do "the women's work" by pushing a button meant men were less opposed to losing their housewives' labor. Having specialized menders and magic cleaners could cause a comparable revolution in a fantasy setting, and help explain why women have a similar standing to men even in combat occupations such as adventuring.
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Healing in general (1st-2nd level).
This one is fairly obvious. A commoner has 4 hit points, that means just about any spell is a full heal to the average person. That means most cuts, stab wounds, etc. can be solved by the resident cleric. Even broken bones that would leave you in bed for months can be solved in a matter of seconds as soon as the holy man arrives.
But that's nothing compared to the ability to cure diseases. While the only spell that can cure diseases is Lesser Restoration, which is second level, a paladin can do it much more easily with just a Lay on Hands. This means if one or two people catch a disease it can just be eradicated with a touch.
However doing that comes with a cost. If everyone is instantly expunged of illness, the populace does not build up their immune systems. Regular disease becomes less common, sure, but whenever it is reintroduced (by, say, immigrants or contact with less civilized humanoids) it can spread like wildfire, afflicting people so fast that no amount of healers will have the magic juice to deal with it.
Diseases become rare, plagues become common.
​
Continual Flame (2nd).
Ok, this one is a topic i love and could easily be its own post.
There's an article called "Why the Falling Cost of Light Matters", which goes in detail about how man went from chopping wood for fire, to using animal fat for candles, then other oils, whale oil, kerosene, then finally incandescent light bulbs, and more recently LED lights. Each of these leaps is orders of grandeur more efficient than the previous one, to the point that the cost of light today is about 500,000 times cheaper than it was for for a caveman. And until the early 1900s the only way mankind knew of making light was to set things on fire.
Continual Flame on the other hand allows you to turn 50gp worth of rubies and a 2nd level spell slot into a torch that burns forever. In a society that spends 60 hours of labor to be able to generate 140 minutes of light, this is a huge game changer.
This single spell, which i am 99% sure was just created as an excuse for why the dungeon is lit despite going for centuries without maintenance, allows you to have things like public lighting. Even if you only add a new "torchpost" every other week or month sooner or later you'll be left with a neatly lit city, specially if the city has had thousands of years in which to gather the rubies and light them up.
And because the demand of rubies becomes so important, consider how governments would react. Lighting the streets is a public service, if its strategically relevant to make the city safer at night, would that not warrant some restrictions on ruby sales? Perhaps even banning the use of rubies in jewelry?
Trivia: John D. Rockefeller, the richest man in history, gained his wealth selling kerosene. Kerosene at the time was used to light lamps. Gasoline was invented much later, when Rockefeller tasked a bunch of scientists to come up with a use for some byproducts of the kerosene production. This illustrates how much money is to be had in the lighting industry, and you could even have your own Rockefeller ruby baron in your game. I shall call him... Dohn J. Stonebreaker. Perfect name for a mining entrepreneur.
Whether the ruby trade ends up a monopoly under the direct supervision of the king or a free market, do keep in mind that Continual Flame is by far the most efficient way of creating light.
​
Gentle Repose (2nd).
Cast it on a corpse, and it stays preserved for 10 days.
This has many potential uses, from preserving foodstuffs (hey, some rare meats are expensive enough to warrant it) to keeping the bodies of old rulers preserved. Even if a ruler died of old age and cannot be resurrected, the body could be kept "fresh" out of respect/ceremony. Besides, it keeps the corpse from becoming undead.
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Skywrite (2nd).
Ok, this one is mostly a gag. While the spell can be used by officials to make official announcements to the populace, such as new laws or important news, i like to just use it for spam. I mean, its a ritual spell that writes a message on the sky; what else would people use it for?
Imagine you show up in a city, and there's half a dozen clouds reading "buy at X, we have what you need", "get your farming supplies over at Joe's store" or "vote Y for the city council".
The possibilities are endless, and there's no way the players can expect it. Just keep in mind that by RAW the spell can only do words, meaning no images. No Patrick, "8===D" is not a word.
​
Zone of Truth (2nd).
This one is too obvious. Put all suspects of a crime into a ZoT, wait a couple minutes to make sure they fail the save, then ask each one if he did it. Sure its not a perfect system, things like the Ring of Mind Shielding still exist, but it's got a better chance of getting the right guy than most medieval justice systems. And probably more than a few contemporary ones. All while taking only a fraction of the time.
More importantly, with all the average crimes being handled instantly, the guards and investigators have more time to properly investigate the more unusual crimes that might actually involve a Thought Shield, Ring of Mind Shielding or a level 17 Mastermind.
There is a human rights argument against messing with people's minds in any way, which is why this may not be practiced in every kingdom. But there are definitely some more lawful societies that would use ZoT on just about every crime.
Why swear to speak the truth and nothing but the truth when you can just stand in a zone of truth?
Another interesting use for ZoT is oaths. When someone is appointed into an office, gets to a high rank in the military or a guild, just put them in a ZoT while they make their oath to stand for the organization's values and yadda yadda. Of course they can be corrupted later on, but at least you make sure they're honest when they are sworn in.
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Sending (3rd).
Sending is busted in so many ways.
The more "vanilla" use of it is to just communicate over long distances. We all know that information is important, and that sometimes getting information a whole day ahead can lead to a 40% return on a massive two-year investment. Being able to know of invasions, monsters, disasters, etc. without waiting days or weeks for a courier can be vital for the survival of a nation. Another notable example is that one dude who ran super fast for a while to be the first to tell his side of a recent event.
But the real broken thing here is... Sending can Send to any creature, on any plane; the only restriction being "with which you are familiar". In D&D dead people just get sent to one of the afterlife planes, meaning that talking to your dead grandfather would be as simple as Sending to him. Settling inheritance disputes was never easier!
Before moving on to the next point let me ask you something: Is a cleric familiar with his god? Is a warlock familiar with his patron?
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Speak With Dead (3rd).
Much like Sending, this lets you easily settle disputes. Is the senate/council arguing over a controversial topic? Just ask the beloved hero or ruler from 200 years ago what he thinks on the subject. As long his skeleton still has a jaw (or if he has been kept in Gentle Repose), he can answer.
This can also be used to ask people who killed them, except murderers also know this. Plan on killing someone? Accidentally killed someone? Make sure to inutilize the jaw. Its either that, being so stealthy the victim can't identify you, or being caught.
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Note on spell availability.
Oh boy. No world-altering 4th level spells for some reason, and suddenly we're playing with the big boys now.
Spells up to 3rd level are what I'd consider "somewhat accessible", and can be arranged for a fee even for regular citizens. For instance the vanilla Priest statblock (MM348) is a 5th level cleric, and the standard vanilla Druid (MM346) a 4th level druid.
Spells of 5th level onward will be considered something only the top 1% is able to afford, or large organizations such as guilds, temples or government.
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Dream (5th).
I was originally going to put Dream along with Sending and Telepathy as "long range communication", but decided against it due to each of them having unique uses.
And when it comes to Dream, it has the unique ability of allowing you to put your 8 hours of sleep to good use. A tutor could hire someone to cast Dream on him, thus allowing him to teach his student for 8 hours at any distance. This is a way you could even access hermits that live in the middle of nowhere or in secluded monasteries. Very wealthy families or rulers would be willing to pay a good amount of money to make sure their heirs get that extra bit of education.
Its like online classes, but while you sleep!
Another interesting use is for cheating. Know a princess or queen you like? She likes you back? Her dad put 400 trained soldiers between you? No problemo! Just find a 9th level Bard, Warlock or Wizard, but who am i kidding, of course it'll be a bard. And that bard is probably you. Now you have 8 hours to do whatever you want, and no physical evidence will be left.
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Raise Dead (5th).
Few things matter more in life than death. And the ability to resurrect people has a huge impact on society. The impact is so huge that this topic needs topics of its own.
First, diamond monopoly. Remember what i said about how Continual Flame would lead to controlled ruby sales due to its strategic value? This is the same principle, but a hundred times stronger. Resurrection is a huge strategic resource. It makes assassinations harder, can be used to bring back your officials or highest level soldiers over and over during a war, etc. This means more authoritarian regimes would do everything within their power to control the supply and stock of diamonds. Which in turn means if anyone wants to have someone resurrected, even in times of peace, they'll need to call in a favor, do a quest, grease some hands...
Second, resurrection insurance. People hate risks. That's why insurance is such a huge industry, taking up about 15% of the US GDP. People insure their cars, houses... even their lives. Resurrection just means "life insurance" is taken more literally. This makes even more sense when you consider how expensive resurrection is: nobody can afford it in one go, but if you pay a little every month or year you can save up enough to have it done when the need arises.
This is generally incompatible with the idea of a State-run monopoly over diamonds, but that just means different countries within a setting can take different approaches.
To make things easier, i even used some microeconomics to make a sheet in my personal random generators to calculate the price of such a service. Just head to the "Insurance" tab and fill in the information relative to your setting.
With actual life insurance resurrection can cost as little as 5gp a year for humans or 8sp a year for elves, making resurrection way more affordable than it looks.
Also, do you know why pirates wore a single gold earring? It was so that if your body washes up on the shore whoever finds it can use the money to arrange a proper burial. Sure there's a risk of the finder taking it and walking away, but the pirates did it anyway. With resurrection in play, might as well just wear a diamond earring instead and hope the finder is nice enough to bring you back.
I got so carried away with the whole insurance thing i almost forgot: the possibility of resurrection also changes how murders are committed.
If you want someone dead but resurrection exists, you have to remove the vital organs. Decapitation would be far more common. Sure resurrection is still possible, but it requires higher level spells or Reincarnate, which has... quirks.
As a result it should be very obvious when someone was killed by accident or an overreaction, and when someone was specifically out to kill the victim.
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Scrying (5th).
This one is somewhat obvious, in that everyone and their mother knows it helps finding people. But who needs finding? Well, that would be those who are hiding.
The main use i see for this spell, by far, is locating escaped criminals. Just collect a sample of hair or blood when arresting someone (or shipping them to hard labor which is way smarter), and if they escape you'll be almost guaranteed to successfully scry on them.
A similar concept to this is seen in the Dragon Age series. If you're a mage the paladins keep a sample of your blood in something called a phylactery, and that can be used to track you down. There's even a quest or two about mages trying to destroy their phylacteries before escaping.
Similarly, if you plan a jailbreak it would be highly beneficial to destroy the blood/hair sample first. As a matter of fact i can even see a thieves guild hiring a low level party to take out the sample while the professional infiltrators get the prisoner out. Keep in mind both events must be done at the same time, otherwise the guards will just collect a new sample or would have already taken it to the wizard.
But guards aren't the only ones with resources. A loan shark could keep blood samples of his debtors, a mobster can keep one of those who owe him favors, etc. And the blood is ceremoniously returned only when the debt is fully paid.
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Teleportation Circle (5th), Transport Via Plants (6th).
In other words, long range teleportation. This is such a huge thing that it is hard to properly explain how important it is.
Teleportation Circle creates a 10ft. circle, and everyone has one round to get in and appear on the target location. Assuming 30ft. movement that means you can get 192 people through, which is a lot of potential merchants going across any distance. Or 672 people dashing.
Math note: A 30ft radius square around a 10ft. diameter square, minus the 4 original squares. Or [(6*2+2)^2]-4 squares of 5ft. each. Hence 192 people.
Getting hundreds of merchants, workers, soldiers, etc. across any distance is nothing to scoff at. In fact, it could help explain why PHB item prices are so standardized: Arbitrage is so easy and cheap that price differences across multiple markets become negligible. Unless of course countries start setting up tax collectors outside of the permanent teleportation circles in order to charge tariffs.
Transport Via Plants does something very similar but it requires 5ft of movement to go through, which means less people can be teleported. On the other hand it doesn't burn 50gp and can take you to any tree the druid is familiar with, making it nearly impossible for tax collectors to be waiting on the other side. Unfortunately druids tend to be a lot less willing to aid smugglers, so your best bet might be a bard using spells that don't belong to his list.
With these methods of long range teleportation not only does trade get easier, but it also becomes possible to colonize or inhabit far away places. For instance if someone finds a gold mine in the antarctic you could set up a mine and bring food and other supplies via teleportation.
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Major Image (6th level slot).
Major Image is a 3rd level spell that creates an illusion over a 20ft cube, complete with image, sound, smell and temperature. When cast with a 6th level slot or higher, it lasts indefinitely.
That my friends, is a huge spell. Why get the world's best painter to decorate the ceiling of your cathedral when you can just get an illusion made in six seconds?
The uses for decorating large buildings is already good, but remember: we're not restricted to sight.
Cast this on a room and it'll always be cool and smell nice. Inns would love that, as would anyone who always sleeps or works in the same room. Desert cities have never been so chill.
You can even use an illusion to make the front of your shop seem flashier, while hollering on loop to bring customers in.
The only limit to this spell is your imagination, though I'm pretty sure it was originally made just to hide secret passages.
Trivia: the ki-rin (VGM163) can cast Major Image as a 6th level spell, at will. It's probably meant to give them fabulous lairs yet all it takes is someone doing the holy horsey a big favor, and it could enchant the whole city in a few hours. Shiniest city on the planet, always at a nice temperature and with a fragrance of lilac, gooseberries or whatever you want.
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Simulacrum (7th).
Spend 12 hours and 1500gp worth of ruby dust, and get a clone of yourself. Notably, each caster can only have one simulacrum, regardless of who the person he cloned is.
How this changes the world? By allowing the rich and powerful to be in two places at once. Kings now have a perfect impersonator who thinks just like them. A wealthy banker can run two branches of his company. Etc.
This makes life much easier, but also competes with Continual Flame over resources.
It also gives "go fuck yourself" a whole new meaning, making the sentence a valid Suggestion.
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Clone (8th).
If there's one spell i despise, its Clone.
Wizard-only preemptive resurrection. Touch spell, costs 1.000gp worth of diamonds each time, takes 120 days to come into effect, and creates a copy of the creature that the soul occupies if the original dies. Oh, and the copy can be made younger.
Why is it so despicable? Because it makes people effectively immortal. Accidents and assassinations just get you sent to the clone, and old age can be forever delayed because you keep going back to younger versions of yourself. Being a touch spell means the wizard can cast it on anyone he wants.
In other words: high level wizards, and only wizards, get to make anyone immortal.
That means wizards will inevitably rule any world in which this spell exists.
Think about it. Rulers want to live forever. Wizards can make you live forever. Wizards want other stuff, which you must give them if you want to continue being Cloned. Rulers who refuse this deal eventually die, rulers who accept stick around forever. Natural selection makes it so that eventually the only rulers left are those who sold their soul to wizards. Figuratively, i hope.
The fact that there are only a handful of wizards out there who are high enough level to cast the spell means its easier for them organize and/or form a cartel or union (cartels/unions are easier to maintain the fewer suppliers are involved).
This leads to a dystopian scenario where mages rule, kings are authoritarian pawns and nobody else has a say in anything. Honestly it would make for a fun campaign in and of itself, but unless that's specifically what you're going for it'll just derail everything else.
Oh, and Clone also means any and all liches are absolute idiots. Liches are people who turned themselves into undead abominations in order to gain eternal life at the cost of having to feed on souls. They're all able to cast 9th level wizard spells, so why not just cast an 8th level one and keep undeath away? Saves you the trouble of going after souls, and you keep the ability to enjoy food or a day in the sun.
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Demiplane (8th).
Your own 30ft. room of nothingness. Perfect place for storage and a DM's nightmare given how once players have access to it they'll just start looting furniture and such. Oh the horror.
But alas, infinite storage is not the reason this is a broken spell. No sir.
Remember: you can access someone else's demiplane. That means a caster in city 1 can put things into a demiplane, and a caster in city 2 can pull them out of any surface.
But wait, there's more! There's nothing anywhere saying you can't have two doors to the same demiplane open at once. Now you're effectively opening a portal between two places, which stays open for a whole hour.
But wait, there's even more! Anyone from any plane can open a door to your neat little demiplane. Now we can get multiple casters from multiple planes connecting all of those places, for one hour. Sure this is a very expensive thing to do since you're having to coordinate multiple high level individuals in different planes, but the payoff is just as high. We're talking about potential integration between the most varied markets imaginable, few things in the multiverse are more valuable or profitable. Its a do-it-yourself Sigil.
One little plot hook i like about demiplanes is abandoned/inactive ones. Old wizard/warlock died, and nobody knows how to access his demiplanes. Because he's at least level 15 you just know there's some good stuff in there, but nobody can get to it. Now the players have to find a journal, diary, stored memory or any other way of knowing enough about the demiplane to access it.
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True Polymorph (9th).
True Polymorph. The spell that can turn any race into any other race, or object. And vice-versa. You can go full fairy godmother and turn mice into horses. For a spell that can change anything about one's body it would not be an unusual ruling to say it can change one's sex. At the very least it can turn a man into a chair, and the chair into a woman (or vice-versa of course).
But honestly, that's just the tip of the True Polymorph iceberg. Just read this more carefully:
> You transform the creature into a different creature, the creature into a nonmagical object, or the object into a creature
This means you can turn a rock or twig into a human. A fully functional human with, as far as the rules go, a soul. You can create life.
But wait, there's more! Nothing there says you have to turn the target into a known creature on an existing creature. The narcissist bard wants to create a whole race of people who look like him? True Polymorph. A player wants to play a weird ass homebrew race and you have no idea how it would fit into the setting? True Polymorph. Wizard needs a way to quickly populate a kingdom and doesn't want to wait decades for the subjects to grow up? True Polymorph. Warlock must provide his patron 100 souls in order to free his own? True Polymorph. The sorcerer wants to do something cool? Fuck that guy, sorcerers don't get any of the fun high level spells; True Poly is available to literally every arcane caster but the sorcerer.
Note: what good is Twinned Spell if all the high level twinnable spells have been specifically made unavailable to sorcerers?
Do keep in mind however that this brings a whole new discussion on human rights. Does a table have rights? Does it have rights after being turned into a living thing? If it had an owner, is it now a slave? Your country will need so many new laws, just to deal with this one spell.
People often say that high level wizards are deities for all intents and purposes. This is the utmost proof of that. Clerics don't get to create life out of thin air, wizards do. The cleric worships a deity, the wizard is the deity.
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Conclusion.
Intelligent creatures not only can game the system, but it is entirely in character for them to do so. I'll even argue that if humanoids don't use magic to improve their lives when it's available, you're pushing the suspension of disbelief.
With this post i hope to have helped you make more complex and realistic societies, as well as provide a few interesting and unusual plot hooks
Lastly, as much as i hate comment begging i must admit i am eager to see what spells other players think can completely change the world. Because at the end of the day we all know that extra d6 damage is not what causes empires to rise and fall, its the utility spells that make the best stories.
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Edit: Added spell level to all spells, and would like to thank u/kaul_field for helping with finishing touches and being overall a great mod.

What is $CGX

Cineplex Inc is a Canadian entertainment company . Comparing it directly to AMC is a little unfair, as it is more diversified - a holding company of sorts. It's comprised of: - Canada's largest movie theater chain - Canada's largest digital movie distributor (CineplexStore.com) - An arcade game distributor called Player One Amusement Group - Arcade/VR + Food chain (think Dave n' Busters) called The Rec Room - SCENE - a loyalty program jointly owned (50%) with ScotiaBank - 75% ownership stake in TopGolf - a "golf-bay + pub" entertainment brand with locations in 6 countries
In fact, despite the raging pandemic, Cineplex posted revenues of $365 million through the first 9 months of 2020 - does that sound like a company that should be valued at $728 million?

$CGX is undervalued

CGX currently trades at around $11.50 CAD, up from $8.70 in early January 2021. The big reason pushing price down has been the Current ratio of 0.24, which indicates their liquid assets currently cannot cover more than 24% of debt. However:

1. Price guidance based on NPV of income flows makes a lot of sense. Guidance based on balance sheet ratios like CR has proven to be a disastrously bad idea recently, as $TSLA has shown. The thing they don't account for is when any sort of price movement happens, these companies can raise huge amounts of easy capital. Tesla went from Elon having to inject his own money in 2019 to raising enough capital to build out factories based on price movement in the blink of an eye. Shorting on the balance sheet - which is the reason for CGX's low guidance - as a tactic is over. This is the era of easy, near-zero-interest capital (at least through 2023). The SEC blocked Hertz's attempt to sell stocks during a rally, but they were bankrupt - CGX can take advantage of price movements and low interest rates in a much more robust manner.
   
2. Most of CGX's debt is deferred revenue. This is the "good kind" of debt to have in that it represents revenue that has been accounted for, for a service yet to be delivered. Even in a worst case, deferred revenue can be spread out ('stretched') and generally doesn't drive companies to bankruptcy.Insiders seem to know this - and have been aggressively buying up the stock in the last 6 months [1]. For this reason, analysts are torn on CGX, with consensus seeming to be hold, leaning to buy [5], and on January 26 2021, CIBC raised price target from $9 to $12 [6].
   

2021 will be the biggest year in movie history

Even before COVID hit, 2021 was on track to be the biggest year in Hollywood's history, box office wise [2]. Now add in a huge chunk of the movies from 2020 on top of that, and you have a recipe for movie theaters like AMC and Cineplex to feast.This is not the cruise industry - their primary customers either 1) died, or 2) will stay the fuck away for the foreseeable future.
The second half of 2021 is going to be a massive boon for movies with sequels and big titles like: - The Purge - Despicable Me - Cinderella - Space Jam - Hotel Transylvania - Boss Baby - The Beatles movie - A Quiet Place 2 - new James Bond - Halloween - Ghostbusters - Mission Impossible - The Matrix - Sherlock Holmes - Babylon - possibly Rugrats and Pinnochio (no date set)
And this list doesn't even include January - July releases like the Spongebob movie, Tom & Jerry, Coming 2 America sequel, Godzilla and King Kong, Mortal Kombat, The Conjuring, Peter Rabbit, Venom, fuck I can go on and on.
Good chance some of these get pushed back and keep running well into the second half of the year unlike usual movie cycles.All this to say - these two chains - even at half capacity - are going to be minting money.
So - if the balance sheet isn't as bad as it looks - and the movie industry is going to bounce back - why was the price target so low?... Because all this is contingent on the vaccine:

No vaccine optimism for Canada - but that will change soon

There's a hold-up of the Pfizer vaccine in Canada, and it's all doom and gloom. Canada is the world's third-richest country (top 10 at worst by average wealth based on which list you look at) - they sent over $8000 a person in relief cheques with no questions asked, and $40k a month per small business, and had competent (if slightly corrupt) leaders when the pandemic hit - do you think they don't have a vaccine play up their sleeve?
These fuckers started human trials for a Canadian-designed, Canadian-manufactured vaccine [3] this week. Pfizer delayed shipments to them to expand production in their Puurs facility in Belgium [4], but are evidently still on track to deliver 4 million vaccines by March.
USA is going to be vaccinating 2 million people a day soon. Canada only has a population of 37 million, 90% of them concentrated in a 100-mile strip along the US border. Distribution is going to be an order of magnitude easier, and when the supply issue is solved, I expect the vaccination effort to take 2 months at most. They've also approved the Moderna vaccine, which AFAIK hasn't even come into play up North.

Price target

On fundamentals only:

My price target is $42/share by EOY, eclipsing February 2020 level of $34/share. The ticker was on track to have a strong 2020, rising steadily from $25 in December 2019 to $34 just before the crash. Fundamentally, nothing has changed for the business from the pre-Covid era, but accounting for overall market movement and buying power drop triggered by the money printing, this is the value I'm comfortable pricing at.

On rocket:

This is hard to predict, so I'd rather not make claims here. However, comparing it to recent squeeze targets like GME and AMC: 2.2 million of the company’s total outstanding 62.34 million shares are held by short sellers. Short interest in the stock is not on the levels of GME, but CGX currently has a market cap 2x larger than pre-🚀 GME. The underlying business is stronger. Is 🌝 attainable? It may well be, but I don't know. What I do know is that there is tiny downside and 3-4x upside within months. Just bought $60k worth of shares - willing to buy more if we are ready to do this together!
[1] https://thecse.com/en/listings/other-canadian-listed-securities/cineplex-inc - see Insider Activity [2] https://comicbook.com/movies/news/2021-biggest-box-office-year-eve
[3] https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/covid-19-vaccine-providence-1.5887613
[4] https://www.macleans.ca/news/why-is-there-a-hold-up-with-pfizers-covid-vaccines/
[5] https://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/CA/XTSE/CGX/research-ratings
[6] https://www.marketbeat.com/instant-alerts/tse-cgx-a-buy-or-sell-right-now-2021-01/

Maybe it started when Dick Cheney won the presidency in 2008, or maybe when Al Gore led the country to war against Saudi Arabia six years earlier, or maybe the beginning of it all went unnoticed by the general public when a Cuban boy drowned en route to Florida in 1999, his death not more than a footnote in the local news. It is impossible to say for sure. But what is certain is that, at some point, a clock began ticking in America, counting down unstoppably, inevitably, to the day when revolution would come to the republic once thought indivisible.
Between the time the clock began ticking and the time its alarm bells rang, there were numerous false alarms, smaller tremors that shook American society before the earthquake that finally split it in two. Here are the three largest of those tremors, the ones which very nearly brought that earthquake on the country prematurely. Here are the three revolutions that weren’t.

2011: The Great Transport Strike

The Great Transport Strike of 2011 was the single largest mobilization of labor in US history.
The roots of the strike go back to the financial crash of 2008, though of course it would not have been possible without the smaller-scale labor unrest that dotted the 2000s. In response to the crash, the newly elected Cheney spent his first year in office slashing regulations and welfare programs. With pressure from his administration, Congress lowered the top marginal tax rate and very nearly defunded social security (the bill failed to pass the House or Representatives), and with lobbyists from the finance sector commanding the Labor and Commerce departments, his cabinet reduced employer-provided healthcare standards. Most relevant to the Great Transport Strike was Cheney’s assault on the minimum wage. One of his first acts as president was to sign a bill into law which halted the third stage of a procedural minimum wage adjustment put into motion near the end of the Gore administration. Had it gone into effect, the third stage would have raised the minimum wage to $7.50, but the new legislation stalled it at $6.71. Another bill he signed in November of 2009 took things a step further by undoing the other two stages, cutting the minimum wage back down to $5.15 even as millions of Americans faced financial ruin or worse. There was much uproar over the second bill in particular, but it went unchallenged at the state level.
What began the chain of events that led to the Great Transport Strike was actually a relatively small affair. In June, UPS drivers in New Mexico went on strike to protest the lack of air conditioning in their vans when a driver in Albuquerque died of heat exhaustion on the 5th. The strike spread to southern California and then Mississippi the following week, involving around 20,000 people altogether—a large strike, but by no means a record-breaking one. At this stage, the Teamsters union leadership was on board with the demonstrations.
Around the same time, FedEx drivers in Michigan went on a single-day strike to drum up public support for a lawsuit they intended to levy against their employers for deducting the cost of replacing damaged goods from their wages, which they claimed constituted wage theft to the point that many of them were making well below minimum wage. The strike, which involved only a handful of small local unions, came and went with little attention from the major media outlets, and had things ended there, the Great Transport Strike likely never would have happened. But of course, they didn’t, and it did. Cheney directed his Department of Labor to refuse to prosecute the wage theft case, which immediately drew national attention to the conflict. Thousands of unorganized workers in Michigan went out on strike on the 12th of June, just as the UPS strike was taking off in California and Missouri. Forming a coordinating committee to organize the actions of roughly three thousand nonunion FedEx workers, which included warehouse staff as well as drivers, the strikers in Michigan set up lines of communication with the striking UPS drivers in the south despite discouragement from the Teamsters leadership.
Alarmed at the apparent cooperation between the two strikes, president Cheney issued an injunction against both strikes, arguing that by showing intent to coordinate their actions they were violating the solidarity strike clause of the Taft-Hartley Act. The Teamsters ordered the striking UPS workers to withdraw from communication with the FedEx strikers, but they ignored both this and the injunction, planning instead to sue to overturn the injunction order. With the strike now out of their hands, the Teamsters leadership withdrew and ordered its members to return to work. Many remained on the picket line, engaging in the first major wildcat strike since the 1940s.
Naturally, the IWW pounced on the opportunity to agitate. As soon as the second FedEx strike began, IWW organizers began firing on all cylinders trying to get workers in other states to go on strike. It worked—by the last week of June, more than 30,000 additional FedEx and UPS workers were on strike across the nation.
On June 28th, the 10th circuit court struck down Cheney’s first injunction order, but he immediately (less than an hour after the ruling was publicized) issued another, this time on the grounds that the UPS strike had become a wildcat strike, and the FedEx one had been one from the beginning. This one would be impossible to overturn, being essentially correct in its assertion and its interpretation of Taft-Hartley. Ignoring the injunction yet again, the strikers persisted, their ranks continuing to swell in the first week of July. With unemployment at an outrageous 12% at this point in time, there was no shortage of labor for FedEx and UPS to bring in as strikebreakers once they were certain they would face no backlash now that the strike was illegal. Violent clashes erupted between strikers and police as the latter attempted to disperse picket lines; occasionally the violence spilled over to the scabs when striking workers tried to block them from entering truck yards and warehouses.
It was only a matter of time before the kindling that was being heaped up encountered a spark. On July 16th, it happened. Police trying to clear out a mass of strikers in St. Louis so a procession of strikebreakers could get to work fired indiscriminately into the crowd, killing seven people, two of whom were scabs. The picket line erupted into a riot which was forcibly dispersed in a flurry of tear gas and rubber bullets. More than fifty people were arrested. In the aftermath of the shooting, tens of thousands of workers, many of whom had been brought in as strikebreakers, joined the strike to protest the brutal attempts to suppress it, bringing their total manpower up from about 80,000 to about 200,000 by the end of July. It was already one of the largest strikes in American history, and it was far from over.
On August 1st, usually considered the date the Great Transport Strike began, 70,000 or more workers in the railroad industry went on strike all at once. After a failed month-long struggle to get their respective unions to call one through official channels, this was yet another wildcat strike. With the railway companies unable to replace many of the workers on short notice due to the training their jobs required, the entire American rail system shut down almost overnight. The remaining workers had little work left to do with rail lines inoperable across the country, so before long the number of railroad workers alone who were participating in the strike neared 100,000.
By this point, the character of the strike had radically changed, and its demands changed with it. What began as a strike with narrow purposes--to recover stolen wages, to get AC units put in delivery trucks--morphed into a general uprising against the conditions imposed on the working class in the wake of the recession. Among the new list of demands were calls for higher wages, welfare reform, an end to right to work laws, and better unemployment benefits at the national level. The specifics varied from one picket line to the next, but the nominally powerful organizing committee kept it simple: a fifteen-dollar federal minimum wage, $400 federal unemployment stipends, and the repeal of Taft-Hartley, along with terms specific to the strike like a general amnesty for those involved and the original demands of the striking UPS and FedEx workers. Some of the more radical participants went further. The IWW pushed for a twenty-dollar minimum wage; CPUSA and the Workers World Party wanted the housing industry to be nationalized to put an end to the burgeoning homelessness crisis. Many local cadres of striking workers wished to see Cheney’s Secretary of Labor resign.
Violence continued to break out on an increasingly large scale. In Detroit, two to three hundred strikers stormed a FedEx warehouse, ransacked it, and burned it to the ground. Intense street fighting with the police persisted for the next three days as local authorities cracked down. In San Diego, The police fatally shot a speaker at an otherwise peaceful rally. An epidemic of attacks on police erupted throughout the city in retaliation, culminating in the siege, abandonment, and destruction of a local precinct. In Atlanta, rail workers occupied a train station for eight days, rendering the locomotives inoperable through sabotage and trading gunfire with the state troopers sent to clear them out. By August 14th, the national guard was mobilized in eleven states.
The strike reached its zenith near the end of August. From the fifth to the eighth, representatives from the strike’s central committee and the IWW met with the leadership of the nation’s biggest unions—the AFL-CIO and its constituent unions, the Teamsters, the USW, the UAW, and the UFCW chief among them—with the goal of convincing the most influential unions in the country to call a general strike. AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka offered a sympathetic ear, but when all was said and done the executive councils of every union present rejected the proposal out of hand. Upset by the outcome, Trumka resigned from his post the following day. With Trumka’s endorsement and the involvement of the IWW, a coalition of AFL-CIO and Teamsters locals split off from the herd to begin organizing a single-day general strike scheduled for the 26th.
When the 26th came, an estimated three million laborers across all sectors stopped working. Roughly 1.3 million people converged on Washington, DC for a march intended to be the centerpiece of the strike, making it by far the largest protest event in American history. Descending on the Lincoln memorial, the marchers heard speeches from a roster of radical voices including people like former vice-presidential candidate Cornel West, IWW organizer Salvador Gutierrez, and renegade AFL-CIO officer Jorge Carreón. That evening, as the behemoth of a match dissipated, impromptu rallies materialized in front of the White House, the Capitol building and the offices of the Department of Labor. These were considerably smaller than the daytime protest, but more frenzied. Bouts of arson elicited brutal crackdowns from the police and the national guard, who were already on edge from the near impossibility of containing a mass of more than a million people in a city of barely half that. Just after midnight, around 80,000 protestors marched west across the Potomac, overwhelming a mass of riot police gathered on the Arlington Memorial Bridge and pushing their way to the Pentagon, which they encircled. For about an hour they chanted “jobs not bombs!”, echoing the slogan of an earlier protest movement, and, more ominously, “burn it down!” At around two in the morning, the DC national guard cleared the area with extreme prejudice. Nine protestors were killed, an unknown number badly wounded.
The theatrics of the 26th kicked off a weekend of protest in DC. Several large demonstrations were held in solidarity with the strikers, accompanied by anti-war and anti-austerity rallies. The first major explicitly communist event was held on the afternoon of Saturday the 27th, when around three thousand members of the Workers World Party and the Freedom Road Socialist Organization marched from the headquarters of the World Bank to join a larger gathering in front of the White House, red banners in hand.
Despite some speculation that the general strike would carry over unprompted into the next work week, most of the three million who had left their jobs on Friday were back at them on Monday—except for the truckers. Nearly 600,000 truckers who hadn’t taken part in the original strike either remained off the job after Friday’s general strike or joined the picket line anew. Several thousand went on strike mid-haul, stopping their trucks in traffic and using them to block off highways. Inspired by this display, thousands of other drivers broke into company lots and commandeered their trucks, driving them to strategic locations on interstates and state highways to clog up the nation’s roadways like clots cutting off an organ’s bloodflow. Several of these mass truck robberies turned into chaotic melees, with workers plowing through police lines in stolen semis as they attempted to flee the scene. Most of this was loosely organized, coordinated over the radio among groups of several dozen drivers apiece making decisions on the fly.
This was the final straw. Within hours of the first mass truck robbery, Cheney declared a state of national emergency. The Department of Justice deployed federal law enforcement officers to assist state forces, with orders to have every picket line shut down and every street cleared before the end of the week, by any means necessary. The army and the marine corps were sent into the hardest-hit cities à la the Los Angeles riots of 1992. On the 31st, Cheney signed an executive order authorizing employers to fire any worker refusing to return to work by noon on September 2nd without regard for existing union contracts and labor regulations. He then signed a second one temporarily permitting the termination of workers for “workplace disobedience,” which the order broadly defined as including any attempt to organize outside of recognized union contracts, encouraging strikes, sit-downs, slow-downs, or boycotts through speech or action, or “defying workplace protocol with the intention of diminishing productivity or causing a work stoppage of any kind.” This second order was set to expire at the end of September, but Cheney remarked to the White House press corps that nothing was off the table when it came to restoring order.
The strike was already faltering by the time Cheney delivered a one-two punch with his executive orders. Just before the general strike on the 26th, UPS had agreed to install air conditioners in its delivery vans and incorporate hazard pay into its drivers’ wages in the meantime. The following day, FedEx, having already agreed to stop docking pay for damaged packages in mid-August, offered substantial raises in a final attempt to lure the Michigan strikers back to work. With funds running low, many of the workers taking part in the original two strikes (which, together, were the core of the entire movement) returned to work after the 26th, deciding they could only hold out for so long and it was better to go home with their original demands met than to stick it out in the face of starvation, eviction, and escalating state violence for a more abstract goal. Demoralized, battered, and hungry, many other workers followed suit. While the weekend of protest raged in DC, the strike was withering away elsewhere in the country. When Cheney made his ultimatum, the strike crumbled.
A few stubborn holdouts remained on strike well into September, including enough of the insurgent truck thieves to keep the interstate system completely shut down in some areas for more than a week. In this period alone, twenty-plus people were killed in armed standoffs between state troopers and truckers. By mid-September, however, the movement was dead.
The Great Transport Strike of 2011 left tremors in its wake which were felt long after the last striker abandoned the picket line. In late September, freshman senator Bernie Sanders wrote a bill to repeal the Taft-Hartley Act, citing Cheney’s use of the act to try to suppress a strike with legitimate grievances during his oral arguments. In the House of Representatives, Barbara Lee motioned to begin impeachment procedures against Cheney’s Secretary of Labor. Sanders’ bill was voted down by a bipartisan supermajority; Lee’s never made it to the floor. The strike was a huge talking point in the 2012 election, but the DNC’s refusal to muster any real resistance to Cheney’s crackdown neutered nominee Hillary Clinton’s ability to go on the offensive in that department. Still, the popular vote swung hard against Cheney, even though he managed to hold on to the electoral college by the skin of his teeth.
The big unions that refused to join in on the strike suffered internal crises in the months that followed. The renegades in the AFL-CIO who helped organize the general strike on the 26th struggled for power with the liberal leadership, which was more concerned with securing and protecting contracts than the kind of fluid militancy the IWW was preaching. Facing pressure from below, the new president resigned in November, triggering new leadership elections which the renegades promptly swept, re-installing Trumka as president in the process. In the years between the strike and the start of the war, the AFL-CIO would grow increasingly radical, and Trumka with it. The Teamsters were not so lucky. Their leadership refused to budge, and rather than waiting around for the next round of elections, their militant faction began defecting to the IWW en masse, causing the latter’s membership to skyrocket during the 2010s.
In the longer term, the events of the strike set in motion a trend of large-scale cooperation between different currents of the American left. The temporary alliance between the WWP and the FRSO during their August 27th march foreshadowed their role as founding members of the United American Reds three years later, and the demonstration of solidarity between militant unions and socialist parties throughout the strike was a precursor to the formation of the Fifth International in 2013.

2015: The Rent Riots

In the three years between the Great Transport Strike and the autumn of 2014, class tensions deteriorated even further. Unemployment never fell below eight percent, the minimum wage was stagnant at just over five dollars, and the homeless population remained at a fairly constant 700,000. Following the 2012 election, Congress was deadlocked between the two major parties, unable to agree on anything except the military budget. Polling showed that confidence in the American political system, already at record lows, plummeted during this period. But while the country was breaking down, the left was bulking up—the Fifth International was founded in early 2013, bringing together some of the most prominent radicals in the nation, and indeed the world, and its member organizations began experimenting with Liam Sutton’s concept of “preventative weaponization” later that year, putting up huge communal stockpiles of arms and ammunition in the hands of the most militant unions and parties in America. It was only a matter of time before this confluence of events proved disastrous for the establishment.
Political turmoil was at an all-time high in mid-to-late 2014. Responding to the Fifth International’s entrance to the scene, a microcosm of the Red Scare sprang up, and at the same time a partisan realignment was underway as many Republicans and the leftmost Democrats reversed their respective positions on gun control. Of course, all of this was happening during the midterm elections, which were turning out to be the most chaotic in recent memory.
As the deadline for the annual appropriations drew nearer, the left wing of the Democratic Party threatened to stage a coup within the party if their policy demands, among them a reduced military budget and expanded Medicare access, were not addressed in the new budget. The progressives had grown into a formidable force since the Blue Movement in 2010, so the prospect of them withholding their votes from Nancy Pelosi in the next Speaker election, or worse yet, breaking off from the Democratic caucus to vote as an autonomous faction of the party, was concerning enough to the party’s higher-ups to give them real leverage. The party yielded and let the progressives include provisions in the proposed bill which would reduce the $750 billion military budget by 20% and expand Medicare to cover those aged 50 and up.
Of course, these provisions were unacceptable to the Republicans, who immediately voted the bill down in the Senate. The one they sent back made no revisions to Cheney’s agenda. The Democrats attempted to get the progressives to work with the Republican bill as a starting point to introduce more limited versions of their demands—a 10% budget cut for the military, for example, or lowering the Medicare age to 55 instead of 50—but they wouldn’t have it. They argued that people were suffering at home and abroad, and the least they could do was put up a decent fight. So the House Democrats sent over another bill, essentially the same one but with minor changes to the infrastructure and education budgets, and it too was voted down by the Senate. With time running out, the conservative wing of the DNC abandoned the military cuts over the outcry of the most staunch progressives, sending over a weaker version of the bill without them. Miraculously, the bill made it through the Senate, but instead of accepting the compromise, Cheney vetoed it. He didn’t just want the military budget to remain high, he wanted it to be higher. The parties remained at an impasse, and on December 22nd, the government shut down. It would turn out to be the longest government shutdown in history, clocking in at seventy-nine days.
The new Congress took office on January 6th, handing a few House seats to the Democrats and a Senate seat to the Republicans. Neither party gained a substantial advantage, and the freshman congresspeople were no more willing to compromise than their veteran colleagues. When another token attempt to pass a bill failed, the two sides finally settled in for the longest game of political chicken ever played.
With funds frozen, the Department of Housing and Urban Development stopped renewing contracts with public housing landlords. Most had advance payments for January, but as the shutdown stretched into February, contracts started expiring, landlords were left with a choice: start charging their tenants full rent, or go broke. Naturally, most chose the former. Near the end of February, more than two thousand landlords had stopped receiving payments, and a large majority of them intended to charge rent at the beginning of March.
This presented a problem. The tenants in these public housing complexes were there because they couldn’t afford to pay full rent elsewhere. For obvious reasons, few, if any, would be able to cover rent when it came due.
Word of the looming wave of evictions spread around the country in the waning days of February. Mass protests were held in DC demanding an end to the government shutdown, none quite as large as the central march on the day of the August 2011 general strike, but several pulling in crowds of over ten thousand. Tenant unions organized rent strikes. Socialists stirred anti-landlord sentiments with rallies in and around public housing complexes, leading to the first arrests of the riots as organizers were jailed on trespassing charges.
The backlash on March 1st was visceral. Angry crowds gathered in front of the nation’s courthouses blocked the handful of landlords who had begun charging rent in February from filing eviction paperwork until the authorities forced them to retreat with salvos of tear gas. In Boston, the crowd at one courthouse returned with a vengeance after sundown and burned it to the ground. Dozens of instances of tenants occupying their buildings, refusing to pay rent or comply with evictions, popped up.
On the third day of unrest, police began violently enforcing evictions. With nothing to lose, some of the more dedicated tenants fought tooth and nail to keep control of their buildings, turning the occupations into sieges and then the sieges into bloodbaths when the police abandoned the last of their restraint. Horror stories of police brutality filled the nightly news. The Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, New York became the site of particularly vicious fighting as the tenants engaged in what amounted to building-to-building guerrilla warfare with the officers sent to evict them. The following night, thousands of evictees swarmed housing projects in a dozen major cities, overwhelmed law enforcement, and seized the properties from their landlords, forcing them to flee (or worse, in a few cases). The chaos spread from the housing complexes to the perceived root causes of the tenants’ housing insecurity. Looting sprees broke out in gentrified neighborhoods. An unfinished high-income apartment building was razed to the ground in Philadelphia, another in Seattle. Banks were up next: two dozen were ransacked on the fourth and fifth nights of March, three of them completely destroyed by arson. An improvised explosive device was detonated in the lobby of a bank on Wall Street, killing none but injuring fifteen. The degree of violence in the tenant occupations rose. In some clashes, deadly firefights broke out when the tenants got ahold of smuggled-in firearms.
In one of the few displays of political self-preservation instincts of his career, Cheney ordered a thirty-day moratorium on evictions on the sixth to stop the flames from being fanned any further. Three days later, the desperate House Democrats caved and passed the Republican bill unaltered. The Senate hurriedly passed it on to Cheney, who signed it that afternoon. HUD money was flowing again shortly, and the riots subsisted in the days that followed.
Like the Great Transport Strike, the Rent Riots of 2015 had far-reaching implications for the left and the country as a whole. Conservative media was ablaze with conspiracy theories that the Fifth International had provoked the riots, or that progressives in Congress had purposely caused the government shutdown knowing it would lead to unrest. In May, senators Mike Pompeo and Ted Cruz co-sponsored a bill which would make it illegal for American labor unions to join the Fifth International or engage in mass buyouts of firearms. In what is often described as the low point for Cheney’s reputation, Bernie Sanders was arrested on the steps of the capitol building after an impassioned six-hour filibuster of the deal, allegedly for advocating violence against the government when he said that “the poor must remain armed at all costs in today’s society” in the face of police brutality. Though he was released shortly thereafter, the incident turned him into a national icon, which put powerful momentum behind his presidential campaign when he declared his intent to run immediately after his release.
The rampant fearmongering about the Fifth International (some of which, to be fair, turned out to be quite accurate) contributed to the rancor of the 2016 election, and is partly responsible for the Secession Crisis of 2017 and the resulting civil war.

2016: The Bezos Riots

That the February Revolt happened so quick on the heels of the Bezos riots makes it debatable whether the latter even qualify as a “revolution that wasn’t” or if they were just the beginning of a revolution that was. Nevertheless, they had a distinct beginning and end, so it’s worth examining them separately.
The 2016 election, of course, was a disaster. More information about it can be found elsewhere, but what is of particular importance here is Jeff Bezos and his independent campaign. Bezos announced the start of his campaign in January of 2016, immediately creating a media sensation as people speculated what the richest man on Earth wanted the office of the presidency for. There was outrage on the left, of course. Many accused him of trying to buy the election, or of running with the intent of spoiling it for Democratic front runner Bernie Sanders if he clinched the nomination, as was projected at the time.
Sanders ran a successful insurgent campaign, heading into the convention in July with an outright majority of pledged delegates. But his popularity was not enough to ward off the machinations of an anxious establishment. All 716 of the party’s superdelegates cast their votes for the conservative Eric Holder, handing him the nomination despite the disapproval of the majority of the party’s base. Like the convention of 1968, rioting quickly broke out. This was but a preview of what was yet to come.
On October 6th, a lone gunman fatally shot Bezos at a rally in New York.
For some, it was a day to mourn, but for many others, it was one to celebrate. That night, throngs of people unashamedly took to the streets to cheer on Bezos’ death. Naturally, the police tried to disperse these impromptu street parties, but as the night wore on they grew more crazed and slipped out of the realm of what the authorities could contain. The biggest conflagration sprouted up in Times Square, where the ground floor of the NASDAQ building was vandalized, its windows bashed in and its lobby scorched by Molotov cocktails. A small group of the most frenzied revelers scaled the Times Tower and toppled several of its billboards, sending them crashing into the street below where the mob, moving as one, dragged them into a massive bonfire in the center of the square. The party-turned-riot finally petered out around four in the morning.
The upwellings of the sixth were the beginning of a longer period of unrest, most of it concentrated in the two weeks following the assassination. Though most of the unrest occurred in New York, there were flashpoints all across the country. An Amazon warehouse in Alabama reported that more than half of the staff failed to show up to work on the seventh, provoking rumors that a strike was underway, but no large-scale revolt of labor ever materialized. A mob in Los Angeles had to be kept at bay with rubber bullets when they marched on Beverly Hills chanting “kill the rich.” In the Bay Area, multiple reports alleged that roving bands of youths dressed in black bloc gear had begun terrorizing rich Silicon Valley neighborhoods, burglarizing their homes, setting fire to their cars, and tearing down the walls of their gated communities. In Chicago, police severely overreacted to a block party coincidentally being held on the night Bezos was shot, teargassing the partygoers in response to a mundane noise complaint. Over the following week, anti-police protests shook the city in tandem with the chaos happening around the country.
The unrest, quickly christened the “Bezos riots,” reached its peak on the night of the tenth, when another mob that had gathered in Times Square was forced to retreat under heavy fire from the NYPD. At loose ends, the mob turned its attention south and marched towards the financial district. It grew in size and fury as it moved south, lashing out against office buildings along the way until it reached Wall Street, where the police were kept on the outer edges of the crowd, giving the rioters near the center free reign over the financial capital of the world. Financiers working late that night were left at the mercy of the masses. The one building with any police protection when the rioters descended on it was the New York Stock Exchange, though the officers were quickly beaten back into the lobby. A number of unguarded buildings, including the Trump building at 40 Wall Street and the American headquarters of Deutsche Bank, saw their lower floors occupied for several hours. Some of the defining photographs of the prewar years were taken that night—a mob parading a prop guillotine down Wall Street, the south end of Manhattan aglow with fires as seen from the Statue of Liberty, and the graffiti-covered NYSE building the morning after, still sporting a banner hung across its facade by vandals the night before reading “PANDEMONIUM - PLACE OF ALL DEMONS”.
These images and others like them dominated the news cycle that week. The whole nation descended into a state of madness for a time. On the twelfth, the Fifth International called an emergency congress, which remains the only one of its kind to this day. Unlike the previous four congresses, this one was conducted entirely out of the public eye, something the press was keen to take note of. Some of the delegates present at the congress wanted International’s member organizations to seize the riots as an opportunity to begin an armed insurrection, holding up the highly spontaneous nature of the unrest as proof that the American people were ready for a revolution. Others feared that any attempt at a revolution would be far more likely to fail and result in a withering reactionary backlash than to actually overthrow the government. Then there were some, though they were an increasingly small minority in the International, who were against the idea of an armed revolution on principle. Ultimately, these latter factions won out, and the fifth congress resolved to merely issue a vague statement in support of the working class. Behind the scenes, however, Liam Sutton led a clandestine effort to organize the Fifth International’s many disparate gun clubs and munitions stockpiles into the skeleton of a revolutionary force. Between the end of the Bezos riots and the beginning of the February Revolt, he and his comrades would craft what would come to be known as the American Worker’s Army.
While Sutton set to work laying the groundwork for the revolution yet to come, the fetal revolution underway was coming to an end before it had a chance to truly begin. Curfews and national guard deployments in a handful of cities put an end to the nightly mayhem not long after the Fifth International held its secret congress, but the working class, still delirious with anger, was not ready to go quiet into that good night. On the 19th, a waiter serving Mark Zuckerberg at a restaurant in Palo Alto pulled out a handgun and shot him twice in the chest at point blank range. He miraculously survived, but the message to the wealthy was clear: there are people in this country who hate you enough to kill you, even at the expense of their own lives. Already uneasy from the killing of Bezos and the gleeful rampage against capitalism that had occurred in its wake, the attempted murder of Zuckerberg was the last straw for many of America’s wealthy elite. From late October through to the end of the year, twenty-seven of the top 100 richest people in the US moved abroad permanently, along with dozens of people lower on the list. This mass exodus of capitalists has since come to be known as the “Great Cash Migration.”
Four months after the Bezos riots, the specter of class conflict would return to haunt America one final time. And the rest is history.

What happened last week in the stock market? What are the next interesting earnings reports? Let’s talk about the stock market!
Hey everyone and Welcome so let’s start with the recap of what has happened in the stock market since Monday.
Monday the DOW rose by more than 1,12% with the broad stock market SP500 also gaining more than half a percent while the NASDAQ was the laggard barely up 0,2% to finish the day while The VIX had another big drop closing at 22.2. About 70% of the companies were gaining while 80% were trading over 50 and 200-day moving averages. The stock market was lead by the energy sector, which saw a major spike of almost 5% with Financials and Industrials also up more than 1% for the day. The rally was pushed mostly by small and mid-cap value stocks while large-cap growth companies were lagging as you can see in this HEAT MAP with the biggest company in the world, Apple, dragging down the sector, down almost 3% for the day. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
Reports also came in on Monday that the PS5 and the new xBox have been sold out the moment they are available in stock, as the two gaming consoles are enjoying great demand, this bolds well for the parent companies Sony and Microsoft especially if they can keep up with the demand for this holiday season including Black Friday, holiday RETAIL SALES are forecasted to rise between 3,6 and 5,2%. XBOX & PS5 NEWS
All this while Europe will start to re-open again after a contraction of the economy due to the latest lockdowns. As they saw the Eurozone PMI falling by almost 4% in October. EUROZONE NEWS
Some good news came from STORE CAPITAL as the rent collections for November remained at 90% with no new tenants requiring deferrals, this suggests that companies are managing to survive even with the current restrictions in place.
We also saw reports that Janet Yellen will be the next Treasury pick as she would become the first person to be at the top of the FED the White House Council of Economic Advisers and the Treasury and she will become the first woman to lead the Treasury. TREASURY NEWS
Moving on, Tuesday we saw the DOW spike more than 1,5%, the SP500 rising 1,6% and the NASDAQ up more than 1,3% in what was a very good day for the stock market with more than 70% of companies advancing and 167 new highs on above average volume. The leaders were once again Energy and Financials, as this 2 sectors, will be two of the fastest benefiting from the end of the pandemic. The rally was continued with value companies leading the way for the 2nd straight day. You can struggle to find red spots in the HEAT MAP from Tuesday but there were a few in healthcare and real estate. This was the first time that the DOW closed over 30k. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
NIKOLA stock tumbled after the recent rally as the GM deal seems less likely every day, as the deadline for the deal is December 3rd.
While October HOME SEARCHES surged over 200% as a Redfin report shows, this leads me to believe that the strong housing demand will keep remaining at this levels for a good period of time.
On Wednesday we saw the stock market take a breather, as the DOW lost 0,6%, the SP500 lost 0,16% while the pandemic plays regained some momentum with the NASDAQ being up almost half a percent before the stock market closed for Thanksgiving.
About 54% of companies were losing ground with below average volume for the day, as Technology and consumer discretionary and staples were the gainers for the day. Value plays did see some normal corrections after the huge gains in the last days as investors were cashing out some money probably before the day off. CHART / SECTORS / CHART
Here is the HEAT MAP from Wednesday as only a couple of companies Like Amazon, Apple, Nvidia and Shopify were gaining, while the energy sector was the biggest laggard.
Also the AAII investor sentiment SURVEY from Wednesday showed that people are getting more bearish or bullish as the neutral feeling fell way below the historical average as bullishness remains very high. This is usually a contrarian indicator, as more bullishness gives me reason to take profits and bearishness to invest in the stock market, though I don’t have the same confidence in this as in the past, as I expect this market rally to last until the end of next year.
News came in from Delta Airlines as pilots approved pay cuts and lower guaranteed hours that could avoid more than 1700 pilots getting cut off. This are great news both for the company and the pilots, as air travel will pick up again in the next years. DELTA NEWS
Also, Deere reported blowout EARNINGS and a beat of more than 1$ per share and a revenue only 0,6% below last year while also issuing strong 2021 forecasts as they see the equipment sales climbing more than 10% compared to 2020 with a strong net income guidance of 3,6 to 4 billion $ compared to the May guidance of 1,6 to 2 billion $. 4Q 2020 / 2021
We closed the week on a short day on Friday as the NASDAQ led the way up 0,93%, the SP500 up 0,24% and the DOW barely up 0,13%. As we saw about 55% of the companies advancing on way below average volume due to the short day of trading with 85% of companies trading below average volumes. Friday was a pretty divided day as Health Care and Tech lead the way while Utilities and Energy saw a slight pullback after the big gains this week. SECTORS / CHART /
Here is the HEAT MAP from Friday as we see that the market was dragged higher by the big tech companies and communication services while the rest of the market was pretty much lagging.
So for the week, the Nasdaq lead the way up 3% and closed at the 45th record of 2020, the SP followed up 2,3% and closed a 26th record of the year with the DOW also rising 2% in this shortened week. While the VIX closed the week just below 21, at the lowest level since February.
So great signs for the recovery of the economy still popped up almost every day, as the stock market is more forward looking than it is a reflection of the current economic conditions. As November will likely be the 7th straight month of job gains, though they will be the fewest in number since the recovery of jobs has begun. NOVEMBER JOBS
Also, Bitcoin has seen its price drop from almost all-time highs at 19,5k down more than 3k before bouncing back to around 17k. The cryptocurrency was due for a correction as it had seen a huge rally in since Labor Day and this correction came as news popped of the Treasury attempting to rush out regulation on crypto-wallets. This would be a big negative factor for people who own Bitcoin not for just it’s value but for using it also. But we will have to wait and see as the Treasury boss will be replaced when the Presidency changes. BITCOIN NEWS / BITCOIN CHART
Some company news from Friday were that PALANTIR saw it’s stock plunge from all time high of 33,5$ to 27,6$ after Citron tweeted that they are shorting the stock with a 20$ price target. This are common tactics that short sellers use in my opinion to get the fast results they expected. Citron also got into a short position on NIO recently and that news also made the stock take a plunged but that has since recovered and even made new all time highs since.
Great news came for sports betting companies like DraftKings and Penn national as Canada seems to be going the same way as the US as legalizing sports betting advances more and more. CANADA NEWS
Also, Tesla has seen a huge spike in the last weeks since the SP500 news, and the stock might see another spike as Musk TWEETED that the full self-driving feature will be released wider in the next weeks as the company finally approaches the end of software development as they collect more and more data. Tesla has surpassed Berkshire and is now the 6th largest company in the US as the stock is up more than 600% year to date making Elon Musk the second richest person in the world behind only Bezos. The company will go into the SP500 index at about 80% of its total market value cap as the index only counts the free-floating shares. I believe we won’t see such a big spike in price when the company will be added to the SP in December, just like it happened with the stock split its more of a buy the news sell the event type of thing. As I expected the stock jumped over the previous all time highs and it might see a little correction when the event actually happens, but in the long run this a company that I will continue to own in my portfolio. TESLA CHART / MUSK WEALTH /
Next week we will have some interesting earnings reports that I expect to beat the estimates from companies like NEXT WEEK EARNINGS
AUTOHOME which is a company that has great potential as it trades at a low P/E, they offer leads and services for auto consumers in China and they have a very wide consumer base to spread to.
With ZOOM also expecting to report on Monday after the close, I recently just sold out of my position in Zoom. I think there is too much positive expectations for the company as it trade at almost 200 times earnings per shares.
Also, Salesforce are expected to announce earnings on Tuesday, as the company saw it’s stock tumble after the news of a possible acquiring of Slack. In the long run that will be a very good play for the company as they have continued to buy more and more companies that allows them to keep growing.
Other companies that are reporting and are very interesting to watch are CrowdStrike and OKTA also on Tuesday with DocuSign , Dollar General, Marvell and Snowflake reporting on Wednesday.
Good news came this Saturday for online retailers as sales jumped more than 20% on Black Friday and are expected to grow between 15 and 35% tomorrow as Cyber Monday may set a new record for online sales. RETAIL EXPECTATIONS
Here are the most important economic data that we are looking for in the next week as it will be a week full of numbers that may impact how the stock market reacts in the near future. Hopefully we will see an improvement in PMI and a decrease in jobless claims and many more improvments. NEXT WEEK ECONOMIC DATA
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