Cornering the Market

Cornering the market is the offense of obtaining sufficient control of a stock, commodity, or other asset to manipulate its price by restricting the available supply, allowing the party that achieves the corner to dictate the terms on which the asset is sold. In the United States both the Commodity Futures Trading Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission treat cornering as a form of illegal market manipulation under securities and futures law, and violations can bring fines, sanctions, or criminal charges. A documented historical example is the attempt by Nelson Bunker Hunt and William Herbert Hunt to corner the world silver market in the late 1970s and early 1980s, at one point controlling rights to more than half of the world's deliverable silver before the price collapsed on the day now known as Silver Thursday.