Potatoes
For years, the NYMEX traders had done a large business trading futures of the Maine Potato crop. According to Leah McGrath Goodman's 2011 book The Asylum, manipulation in this market was commonplace, performed by various parties including potato inspectors and NYMEX traders. The worst incident was the 1970s potato bust, when Idaho potato magnate J. R. Simplot allegedly went short in huge numbers, leaving a large amount of contracts unsettled at the expiration date, resulting in a large number of defaulted delivery contracts. A public outcry followed, and the newly created Commodity Futures Trading Commission held hearings. NYMEX was barred from trading not only potatoes futures, but from entering new areas it hadn't traded in before. NYMEX's reputation was severely damaged, because, as future chairman Michel Marks told Goodman in his book, "The essence of an exchange is the sanctity of its contract".
Read more about this topic: New York Mercantile Exchange
Famous quotes containing the word potatoes:
“a fat Reichian wife screeching over potatoes Get a job!
And five nose running brats in love with Batman”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)
“Who lives longer: the man who takes heroin for two years and dies, or the man who lives on roast beef, water and potatoes till ninety-five? One passes his twenty-four months in eternity. All the years of the beef-eater are lived only in time.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“It would be as wise to set up an accomplished lawyer to saw wood as a business as to condemn an educated and sensible woman to spend all her time boiling potatoes and patching old garments. Yet this is the lot of many a one who incessantly stitches and boils and bakes, compelled to thrust back out of sight the aspirations which fill her soul.”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)