Читать книгу Financial Cold War. A View of Sino-US Relations from the Financial Markets онлайн

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Notwithstanding its inventors' later misadventures, the advent of the Black-Scholes model in 1973, coupled with developments in computer technology, brought about a revolution in the financial services industry. Before that, trading required few academic qualifications and there were many examples of mailroom clerks who had risen to untold riches in the rough and tumble of the markets. Nowadays, trading rooms have been taken over by mathematicians and scientists holding advanced degrees.

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President Nixon's abandonment of the dollar's fix to gold sparked demand for hedging currency volatility that had previously been subdued by the Bretton Woods system. This was a void that CME's energetic chairman Leo Melamed moved rapidly to fill.

Melamed was born into a Jewish family in Bialystok, Poland in 1932. His father was a mathematics teacher. At the outbreak of WW2, the family fled to Lithuania and were one of the fortunate Jewish families to receive a life-saving transit visa issued by Japanese vice-consul Sugihara Chiune in 1940. After a long passage via Siberia to Japan, the family eventually crossed the Pacific to the US and settled in Chicago. Melamed trained as a lawyer but, while attending John Marshall Law School, he answered a job advertisement for a position at Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane. Thinking that a firm with such a lengthy name could only be an established law partnership, he inadvertently found himself working as a trading floor order-runner on the CME. He became hooked on the markets and it was not long before he bought his own membership seat on the exchange. By 1969, he had risen to become chairman.