After a week at Bell Labs, Bao Zixuan tackled both money and dreams. Yul Engel joined Black Cloud Mobile with his technical team. And as the chief engineer of the mobile phone R&D department, his assistants have also made proper arrangements.

At the same time, Bao Zixuan also purchased the UNIX operating system and charge-coupled components from Bell Labs, which are used for patent licensing for barcode readers, cameras, scanners, photocopiers and other products. These technologies are now more common in the market, so they are not very expensive. However, whoever wants to produce it must also buy a patent from Bell Labs. This laboratory is so powerful, and the foundation is so profound that you can't see the edge.

After arranging the research and development of mobile phones, Bao Zixuan came to New York again. Blackstone Fund staff vacations have ended, and a new round of feast is about to begin. This time he's going to get his hands dirty with silver and gold, and it's the best chance for decades to come.

The Hunt family, once one of the richest families in the world until 1980, is in decline today, but it is still not to be underestimated. The family's founder, H.L. Hunt, was born in rural Illinois in 1889 as the youngest child. His parents ran farms and the family was relatively wealthy, but he had no formal education from an early age. In 1912, at the age of 23, Hunt began running a cotton plantation in Arkansas, and the First World War brought about an increase in the price of agricultural products (8.000, -0.89, -10.01%), which made Hunt his first pot of gold.

In 1957, Fortune magazine estimated that H.L. Hunter had a fortune of $400 million to $700 million, making him one of the eight richest people in the United States at the time. The second-generation Hunter family members did not sit back and seek out new investment opportunities: Nelson Hunter worked on the Libyan oil fields, but later the political turmoil in Libya led to the seizure of the oil fields, and the potential investment loss could be as high as $4 billion; Carolyn Hunter opened the Hotel and Lodge Group and became her own chairman; Rama Hunter participated in the formation of the North American Football League and the North American Football League, and named the annual football finals "Super Bowl"; Swanny Hunt served as U.S. ambassador to Austria and taught at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government. It can be said that the influence of the Hunter family on the political economy of the United States has permeated the lives of most people.

Soybeans were one of the most important U.S. export commodities in the early 1970s. It is not only widely used in the production of feed and edible oil, but also on the table of Americans. In the summer of 1973, high demand for soybeans even ran out of stock, and the government was forced to suspend soybean exports – a rare treatment for an agricultural product that is not a staple food. Everyone in government and corporation is talking about soybeans. Isn't this commodity a great target for such a popular commodity and such a scarcity?

As a result, Nelson Hunter began to use the power of the entire family to speculate on soybeans. Soon, he will have his first confrontation with the U.S. government, which was just a rehearsal of the 1980 silver crisis.

In 1973, Nelson-Hunter began buying spot silver in the Middle East, while buying silver futures on the futures markets in New York and Chicago. The decision was very strategic, and the Hunter family seized the last quiet moment before the price of silver rose, building up a large number of positions at the bottom. In December 1973, the Hunter family had purchased $20 million worth of spot silver and 35 million ounces of silver futures at a cost of $2.9 per ounce, making them one of the largest holders of silver in the world.

In the summer of 1979, Nelson Hunt finally launched a general offensive. He's going to give the last push to the slow-rising price of silver, causing it to blow out like gold. One of the biggest tragedies in the history of commodity futures has finally officially begun.

In the summer of 1979, the duel between the Hunt family and silver dealers from all over the world began. Nielsen Hunter, through its controlled International Metals Investment Corporation, placed buy orders totaling 40 million ounces on the New York and Chicago futures exchanges. The "International Metal Investment Corporation" actually has only two groups of shareholders, the first group is the Hunt family, and the second group is the Saudi prince and the super-rich. If you can't understand the nature of this investment company, you can think of the shareholding structure of "Blackstone" - a greedy board of directors and a foreign exchange investor from a developing country, this is the routine of the "International Metals Investment Corporation" back then.

Nelson Hunter and his younger brother William Hunter complete purchase orders through a number of Wall Street brokers, including large investment banks such as Hilson, Becky, and others. There was a huge amount of buying in the market, and the price of silver quickly rose from $6 to $11, but no one knew who was buying. The U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) examined the trading records and found that most of the buy orders came from the International Metals Investment Corporation, which is registered in Bermuda. After a closer investigation, the fox tail of the Hunt family is finally revealed. Soon, every dealer in New York and Chicago knew that the Hunters were the backstage bosses of the International Metals Investment Company, one of the richest families in the world!

Interestingly, when the news spread that the Hunter family was manipulating silver, the price of silver continued to skyrocket, and many small speculators poured into the market. The reason is very simple, since the Hunter family is "banking" for silver, then small speculators should of course choose to "follow the bank", so that although it is very dangerous, there is a chance to make a lot of money. As speculators poured in, the price of silver went crazy – from $11 to $20, then $30, and by the end of 1979 it had simply exceeded $40! The price of gold and silver fell to about 12 times, hitting a record low. The futures market has completely lost control of silver. When will it end?

Large futures traders in Chicago and New York are concerned about the Hunter family's monopolistic practices. At the end of 1979, the Hunt family manipulated 53 percent of silver futures contracts on the New York Mercantile Exchange and 69 percent of silver futures contracts on the Chicago Stock Exchange, holding a total of 120 million ounces of spot and 50 million ounces of futures — not counting the personal holdings of silver by Saudi Arabian investors. At that time, the global silver trading volume was only about 20 million ounces a year, and the Hunter family had cut off the channels for silver circulation! The Chicago Trading Commission's largest grain trader said a very classic phrase: "We would rather let the BY market go out of business than see it monopolized." "It seems that the Hunter family has offended the public outrage, and the big traders in the United States have sided with them.

Silver producers around the world were so excited that they quickly began to search for new silver mines, and many of the long-closed mines were reopened. Ordinary residents of the United States and Europe were also pleasantly surprised by the rise in the price of silver, and they rummaged through boxes and cabinets to find ancestral silver tea utensils and ornaments, and all those with silver as raw materials were not hesitated to be smelted and made into standard silver bullion to be sold on the market. As a result, the supply of silver in the market increased, and the Hunt family's efforts to monopolize the price of silver were challenged. Despite Nelson-Hunter's efforts to keep buying, he has become a bit overwhelmed – no matter how huge the Hunter family's wealth is, it is still a bit overwhelming to be the enemy of the world.

Moreover, the biggest enemy of the Hunter family has not yet made a move, and this enemy is the US government. The U.S. government holds large quantities of silver, including bullion used as a federal reserve and silver coins that were issued in the early years and recovered after issuance, which may total tens of millions of ounces. Central banks around the world also hold large silver reserves, and while no central bank can control more silver than the Hunt family, as long as they intervene in the market together, the Hunt family will die.

By January 1980, the Hunters had achieved very big results - the price of silver had risen to $48 and was climbing towards $50, and most of the short traders who were enemies of the Hunter family had already conceded losses, and no one dared to sell short on a large scale anymore. However, the Hunter family also felt the pressure, because the price of silver was too high, and it was difficult for the Hunt family to continue to raise the price of the capital. In order to maintain a monopoly on the BY market, Nielsen Hunt was forced to borrow at high interest rates from several large banks in the United States, with an average interest rate of up to 19%. Several investment banks on Wall Street have also lent heavily to the Hunter family, allowing them to continue playing the game of market manipulation for the time being.

According to an investigation by the US Commodity Exchange Commission, in the winter of 1979, the total value of silver futures contracts in the hands of the Hunter family was as high as $3 billion, and by January 1980, the total value of the contracts may exceed $5 billion! In the two months from the end of 1979 to the beginning of 1980, the Hunt family borrowed tens of millions of dollars from major US banks and more than $200 million from Wall Street brokers, making them almost the largest borrowers in the United States and even in the world. It costs them millions of dollars a month just to pay interest, and manipulating silver has become a money-burning game, even more so than war.