Word: tradings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Word of the sting prompted widespread soul-searching on the normally ebullient trading floors of the Merc and the Chicago Board of Trade. "There's paranoia in the pits today," said a futures trader. "Nobody knows just how much the feds have got and against whom." Several panicky traders who reportedly had been subpoenaed sold their exchange seats, including one on the Merc that went for only $330,500, a sharp drop from the previous sale at $380,000 only a week earlier. Many traders worried about what the scandal might cost Chicago's booming markets in terms of lost...
Originally set up more than 70 years ago to help farmers hedge their bets on the future of their crops, the Merc and the Board of Trade grew explosively during the 1980s by offering futures contracts on everything from foreign currencies to precious metals. But for all their sophisticated new financial products, the exchanges still use the old-fashioned, face-to-face auction system of making trades. The leader of the investigation, Anton Valukas, the U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Illinois, apparently decided that the system left plenty of room for rip-offs of commodities buyers...
Federal law requires that traders and brokers must try to get the best possible price for their customers when executing trades. But because the deals are conducted orally, illegal trades are difficult to catch. When four FBI agents masqueraded as commodities dealers, however, they were able to secretly tape-record the transactions taking place at the Board of Trade and ! the Mercantile Exchange...
Addressing the trade imbalance...
Bennett, if confirmed, will oversee and coordinate all the Government's drug efforts. Next to the deficit, drugs are the hot spot of politics. Like Bush, Bennett believes the U.S. must sharpen attacks on both the supply and the demand ends of the drug trade. But long ago he saw that education was the only way finally to control the scourge. "The core problem is the children," he told friends, "particularly children in the big cities. They are dying from drugs...