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The Cotton Kings - Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Hardcover)
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The Cotton Kings - Capitalism and Corruption in Turn-of-the-Century New York and New Orleans (Hardcover)
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The Cotton Kings relates a rip-roaring drama of competition in the
marketplace and reveals the damage markets can cause when they do
not work properly. It also explains how they can be fixed through
careful regulation. At the turn of the twentieth century, cotton
was still the major agricultural product of the American South and
an important commodity for world industry. Key to marketing cotton
were futures contracts, traded at exchanges in New York and New
Orleans. Futures contracts had the potential to hedge risk and
reduce price volatility, but only if the markets in which they were
traded worked properly. Increasing corruption on the powerful New
York Cotton Exchange pushed prices steadily downwards in the 1890s,
impoverishing millions of cotton farmers. The U.S. Department of
Agriculture tried to solve the problem with better crop predictions
and market information, shared equally and simultaneously with all
participants, but these efforts failed. To fight the cotton
market's corruption, cotton brokers in New Orleans, led by William
P. Brown and Frank Hayne, began quietly to assemble resources. They
triumphed in the summer of 1903, when they cornered the world
market in cotton and raised its price to reflect the reality of
increasing demand and struggling supply. The brokers' success
pushed up the price of cotton for the next ten years. However, the
structural problems of self-regulation by market participants still
threatened the cotton trade. More corruption at the New York Cotton
Exchange appeared, until eventually political pressure inspired the
Cotton Futures Act of 1914, the federal government's first
successful regulation of a financial derivative.
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