Book of the week: The Futures by Emily Lambert

(Basic, $26.95)

Emily Lambert’s “fast-paced, informal” history of Chicago’s futures market is animated by a profound insight, said Kirkus Reviews. “Finance is like biology,” she says. “Everything is intertwined.” While tracking the futures racket from the “brawling trading pits” of the 19th century to the “glass-tower imperiousness” of today, Lambert heaps plenty of love on the industry’s most outrageous risk takers and rogues. Their stories matter, we learn, because past practice shapes even today’s markets, making history’s heroes and swindlers part of the industry’s DNA.

But given that futures markets now determine prices for everything from gasoline to foreign currencies, Lambert should have done more to answer a question that’s puzzled hog farmers and cattle butchers since the founding of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, said Roger Lowenstein in The Wall Street Journal. Namely, “do such markets truly serve the public interest?” One can’t help but wonder why producers don’t just set prices.

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