From Pragmatic Capitalism:

... I have not read it yet, but my friend Ian McAvity recommends the book Beyond Greed by Stephen Fay for insights on that whole 1980 silver bubble episode. Ian has been writing the newsletter Deliberations since shortly after the earth’s crust cooled, and he is a well known expert on the precious metals markets.

I thought it would be interesting to see how the silver top of 2011 might compare to that 1980 episode. One big point of similarity between the two events has been the efforts of the CME Group (successor to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange) to raise margin requirements for futures traders in order to curtail excessive speculation. And the $50/oz level appears to have been the price that the CME group wanted to defend, just as in the 1980 episode. Like the 1980 example, silver’s first stop on the way down from $50 was an intraday low at $33.54, just six trading days after the top.

The key point of difference between the two periods in this comparison is that I had to bend time a little bit in order to align the other chart structures. The patterns look the same, but...

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