Streetwise Professor

Today is the 25th anniversary of the most important event in my professional life. On 11 July, 1989, the Chicago Board of Trade issued an Emergency Order requiring all firms with positions in July 1989 soybean futures in excess of the speculative limit to reduce those positions to the limit over five business days in a pro rata fashion (i.e., 20 percent per day, or faster). Only one firm was impacted by the order, Italian conglomerate Ferruzzi, SA.

Ferruzzi was in the midst of an attempt to corner the market, as it had done in May, 1989. The EO resulted in a sharp drop in soybean futures prices and a jump in the basis: for instance, by the time the contract went off the board on 20 July, the basis at NOLA had gone from zero to about 50 cents, by far the largest jump in that relationship in the historical record.

The EO set off a flurry of legal action. Ferruzzi tried to obtain an injunction against the CBT. Subsequently, farmers (some of whom had dumped truckloads of beans at the door of the CBT) sued the exchange. Moreover, a class action against Ferruzzi was also filed. These cases took years to wend their ways through the legal system. The farmer litigation (in the form of Sanner v. CBT) wasn’t decided (in favor of the CBT) until the fall of 2002. The case against Ferruzzi lasted somewhat less time, but still didn’t settle until 2006.

I was involved as an expert in both cases. Why?

Well, pretty much everything in my professional career post-1990 is connected to the Ferruzzi corner and CBT EO, in a knee-bone-connected-to-the-thigh-bone kind of way.

The CBT took a lot of heat for the EO. My senior colleague, the late Roger Kormendi, convinced the exchange to fund an independent analysis of its grain and oilseed markets to attempt to identify changes that could prevent a recurrence of the episode. Roger came into my office at Michigan, and told me about the funding. Knowing that I had worked in the futures markets before, asked me to participate in the study. I said that I had only worked in financial futures, but I could learn about commodities, so I signed on: it sounded interesting, my current research was at something of a standstill, and I am always up for learning something new. I ended up doing about 90 percent of the work and getting 20 percent of the money 😛 but it was well worth it, because of the dividends it paid in the subsequent quarter century. (Putting it that way makes me feel old. But this all happened when I was a small child. Really!)

The report I (mainly) wrote for the CBT turned into a book, Grain Futures Contracts: An Economic Appraisal. (Available on Amazon! Cheap! Buy two! I see exactly $0.00 of your generous purchases.) Moreover, I saw the connection between manipulation and industrial organization economics (which was my specialization in grad school): market power is a key concept in both. So I wrote several papers on market power manipulation, which turned into a book . (Also available on Amazon! And on Kindle: for some strange reason, it was one of the first books published on Kindle.)

The issue of manipulation led me to try to understand how it could best be prevented or deterred. This led me to research self-regulation, because self-regulation was often advanced as the best way to tackle manipulation. This research (and the anthropological field work I did working on the CBT study) made me aware that exchange governance played a crucial role, and that exchange  governance was intimately related to the fact that exchanges are non-profit firms. So of course I had to understand why exchanges were non-profits (which seemed weird given that those who trade on them are about as profit-driven as you can get), and why they were governed in the byzantine, committee-dominated way they were. Moreover, many advocates of self-regulation argued that competition forced exchanges to adopt efficient rules. Observing that exchanges in fact tended to be monopolies, I decided I needed to understand the economics of competition between execution venues in exchange markets. This caused me to write my papers on market macrostructure, which is still an active area of investigation: I am writing a book on that subject. This in turn produced many of the conclusions that I have drawn about HFT, RegNMS, etc.

Moreover, given that I concluded that self-regulation was in fact a poor way to address manipulation (because I found exchanges had poor incentives to do so), I examined whether government regulation or private legal action could do better. This resulted in my work on the efficiency of ex post deterrence of manipulation. My conclusions about the efficiency of ex post deterrence rested on my findings that manipulated prices could be distinguished reliably from competitive prices. This required me to understand the determinants of competitive prices, which led to my research on the dynamics of storable commodity prices that culminated in my 2011 book. (Now available in paperback on Amazon! Kindle too.)

In other words, pretty much everything in my CV traces back to Ferruzzi. Even the clearing-related research, which also has roots in the 1987 Crash, is due to Ferruzzi: I wouldn’t have been researching any derivatives-related topics otherwise.

My consulting work, and in particular my expert witness work, stems from Ferruzzi. The lead counsel in the class action against Ferruzzi came across Grain Futures Contracts in the CBT bookstore (yes, they had such a thing back in the day), and thought that I could help him as an expert. After some hesitation (attorneys being very risk averse, and hence reluctant to hire someone without testimonial experience) he hired me. The testimony went well, and that was the launching pad for my expert work.

I also did work helping to redesign the corn and soybean contracts at the CBT, and the canola contract in Winnipeg: these redesigned contracts (based on shipping receipts) are the ones traded today. Again, this work traces its lineage to Ferruzzi.

Hell, this was even my introduction to the conspiratorial craziness that often swirls around commodity markets. Check out this wild piece, which links Ferruzzi (“the Pope’s soybean company”) to Marc Rich, the Bushes, Hillary Clinton, Vince Foster, and several federal judges. You cannot make up this stuff. Well, you can, I guess, as a quick read will soon convince you.

I have other, even stranger connections to Hillary and Vince Foster which in a more indirect way also traces its way back to Ferruzzi. But that’s a story for another day.

There’s even a Russian connection. One of Ferruzzi’s BS cover stories for amassing a huge position was that it needed the beans to supply big export sales to the USSR. These sales were in fact fictitious.

Ferruzzi was a rather outlandish company that eventually collapsed in 1994. Like many Italian companies, it was leveraged out the wazoo. Moreover, it had become enmeshed in the Italian corruption/mob investigations of the early 1990s, and its chairman Raul Gardini, committed suicide in the midst of the scandal.

The traders who carried out the corners were located in stylish Paris, but they were real commodity cowboys of the old school. Learning about that was educational too.

To put things in a nutshell. Some crazy Italians, and English and American traders who worked for them, get the credit-or the blame-for creating the Streetwise Professor. Without them, God only knows what the hell I would have done for the last 25 years. But because of them, I raced down the rabbit hole of commodity markets. And man, have I seen some strange and interesting things on that trip. Hopefully I will see some more, and if I do, I’ll share them with you right here.