The story of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is one of drama and vigor, shaped by major historical events and by characters charged with a spirit of survival. One of America's major business success stories as the world's leading financial futures and options exchange, no book has told its story until now. The Merc is a first-time look inside this extraordinary institution, where the trading pits are a whirl of flailing hands, emotional highs and lows, and traders screaming buy and sell orders - the last bastion of free and untrammeled capitalism. Established in 1919, by 1991 the Merc supported trading with an underlying value of approximately $50 trillion - almost forty times as much as the value of all equities traded on the New York Stock Exchange. The roots of the Merc go back to 1873 and the Great Chicago Fire, when the city rose from the ashes to become the great commercial center it is today. But the road has not been without pitfalls. By the 1950s, the Merc was a faltering agricultural commodities exchange on the brink of extinction. In 1972, on the heels of the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreement, the Merc created the International Monetary Market, which has played a vital role in helping businesses and individuals navigate the rocky shoals of world currency and financial markets. Since then, the Merc has continued to pursue new directions. In 1980 it became the first American exchange to open a European office. In 1984 it followed up with trading links to the Singapore International Monetary Exchange and a Tokyo office - again a first - in 1987. Now it is leading the efforts to create twenty-four-hour international trading with its GLOBEX partnership. In 1987 a turf war erupted between conservative Wall Street interests and Chicago's freewheeling futures exchanges. The Justice Department accused the Merc's traders of winking at widespread fraud, and the FBI infiltrated the Merc and the CBOT. But three years later, President Bush visited the exchan
