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:
“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 will soon be forgotten, in these days of stoves, that we used to roast potatoes in the ashes, after the Indian fashion.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)