Sleepy Stock Market

Sleepy Stock Market

Financial history told as cinematic bedtime stories. Deep-dive documentary episodes covering the great market crashes, speculative bubbles, and legendary investors that shaped the modern world. From Tulip Mania to the 1929 Crash. From Jesse Livermore to Jeremy Grantham. Every episode is a feature-length documentary for your ears — perfect for winding down, long commutes, or anyone who finds the story behind the money more fascinating than the money itself. New episodes weekly.

  1. Jul 22

    The Hunt Brothers: The Silver Crash of 1980

    In January 1980, silver hit $50 an ounce. A year earlier it had cost $6. Behind that staggering rise were two Texan brothers — Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt — who had spent seven years quietly accumulating one of the largest private hoards of silver in history.This is the story of how they did it, why they did it, and how it all came crashing down in a single catastrophic week that nearly brought the American financial system to its knees.We go back to the beginning: to H.L. Hunt, the wildcatter father who distrusted banks, stockpiled cash, and preached that paper money was a fiction. We trace Bunker's rise through Libyan oil fields, his devastating expropriation by Qaddafi, and the conviction that hardened inside him — that only physical silver, sitting in a vault you controlled, was truly safe.You'll learn how the brothers secretly partnered with Saudi businessmen to pool billions in oil wealth, how they used leveraged futures contracts to amplify their bet to almost incomprehensible scale, and how the COMEX exchange — whose own governors held conflicting short positions — passed an emergency rule that froze the market and triggered the collapse.We cover Silver Thursday in full: the margin calls, the emergency bank bailout, the congressional hearings, and the billion-dollar antitrust verdict. And we follow both brothers through bankruptcy into their very different endings.Whether this was a sincere inflation hedge, a deliberate corner, or something in between is a question that economists still argue about today. We present the evidence and let you decide.If you enjoy financial history told in full, with the human drama left intact, subscribe — we publish new episodes every week.📖 CHAPTERS0:00 The Day Silver Hit $501:38 The Father Who Feared Paper Money4:11 The Sons Who Inherited His Fear7:29 The Libyan Catastrophe20:45 The Secret Saudi Alliance26:55 Silverware Into Gold40:35 Silver Thursday: The Collapse49:08 Bankruptcy, Verdicts & Redemption🔔 Subscribe for more financial history documentaries

    The Hunt Brothers: The Silver Crash of 1980
  2. Jul 19

    He Ran Britain's Railways & Died Broke - George Hudson - The Railway King

    In December 1871, a train arrived in York carrying a coffin. Thousands lined the streets to watch it pass. The man inside had once controlled a third of all the railways in Britain — received by dukes, dined with prime ministers, and called a king by the most celebrated wit of the age. When auditors opened his accounts after his death, they found personal assets worth less than two hundred pounds.This is the story of George Hudson — orphaned at eight, apprenticed to a draper at fifteen, transformed overnight by a mysterious inheritance of thirty thousand pounds, and then launched on one of the most spectacular rises in Victorian financial history. At his peak, Hudson commanded over a thousand miles of railway track, reshaped the map of industrial Britain, and sat at the very centre of the railway mania of the 1840s.But behind the dividends and the prestige lay a system that could not hold. In this episode, we trace exactly how Hudson built his railway empire, how the accounting worked, why investors believed him for so long, and how it finally unravelled — stripping him of his homes, his seats in Parliament, and his standing in the city that once worshipped him.This is financial history told in full: the mechanics of Victorian share speculation, the psychology of mania, and the human cost of a collapse that ruined thousands of ordinary investors across Britain.If you find this kind of deep-dive financial history useful, subscribing helps us make more of it.📖 CHAPTERS0:00 A Coffin Arrives in York4:50 Born in a Village, Leaving a Debt9:40 The Draper's Apprentice16:00 The Inheritance That Changed Everything22:00 Building an Empire of Credit28:00 The Railway King Is Born34:00 How the Fraud Actually Worked40:00 The Shareholders Turn46:00 Exile and Disgrace52:00 Two Hundred Pounds56:00 What York Remembered🔔 Subscribe for more financial history documentaries

    He Ran Britain's Railways & Died Broke - George Hudson - The Railway King

About

Financial history told as cinematic bedtime stories. Deep-dive documentary episodes covering the great market crashes, speculative bubbles, and legendary investors that shaped the modern world. From Tulip Mania to the 1929 Crash. From Jesse Livermore to Jeremy Grantham. Every episode is a feature-length documentary for your ears — perfect for winding down, long commutes, or anyone who finds the story behind the money more fascinating than the money itself. New episodes weekly.