A group of UChicago students is pushing to ‘re-peel’ the Onion Futures Act of 1958 In the U.S., investors can legally trade futures contracts tied to all sorts of commodities, from pork bellies to oil to the computing power needed to power artificial-intelligence models. Congress voted to ban onion trading in the U.S. decades ago, following a notorious market-manipulation scandal that bankrupted investors and farmers across the U.S. David Booth on Active Managers vs.
Indexing Play video: David Booth on Active Managers vs. Indexing Now, a group of students at the University of Chicago is trying to have the law repealed. Don’t Short Yourself offers weekly money tips to help you earn it, stack it and grow it.
I would like to receive updates and special offers from Dow Jones and affiliates. I can unsubscribe at any time. On Monday, dozens of members of the group “For Our Futures” gathered outside of the CME Building in Chicago for a demonstration aiming to enlist the support of CME Group, the U.S. mecca for futures trading, in their campaign to abolish the Onion Futures Act of 1958.
Photos and video from the event showed students waving signs and chanting slogans like “58, out of date, let our onions speculate!” Members of the group acknowledged that American society faces bigger and more pressing issues these days. But the decision to focus on such a niche problem was intended to show that a small but committed group of citizens can still successfully push for policy changes at the federal level. Ash and other members told MarketWatch that they believed the status quo left American consumers at a disadvantage.
Without an active market, prices are probably higher than they would otherwise be, the students said. Like many members of the group, Ash is studying economics. But he told MarketWatch that he became interested in the Onion Futures Act of 1958 after reading about it on Wikipedia.
Just as the organizers had hoped, the demonstration caught the attention of users on X and other social-media platforms, where some contrasted the relatively tame demonstration with the more chaotic protests unfolding in Europe. Others joked that a protest about commodity futures was distinctly on brand for the University of Chicago, the birthplace of the Chicago School of economics. UChicago has produced more Nobel laureates in economics than any other university in the world, and has long been closely associated with the study of economics and finance.
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