Origins of Currency Futures and other Digital Derivatives

Thus, it was fitting that Chicago emerged as the Risk Management Capital of the World—particularly since the 1972 introduction of financial futures at the International Monetary Market, the IMM, of the CME. – Leo Melamed to the Council of Foreign Relations, June 2004 International currency exchange rates began to float in the post-Bretton Woods environment […]

Lotus Spreadsheets – The Killer App of the Reagan Revolution – Part 2 – Spreadsheet Capitalism Emerges

In order to understand the widespread adoption of the spreadsheet during the “Reagan Revolution” and its political-economic implications, it is important to understand the context in which it emerged. In Part 1, I identified a number of characteristics of the Reagan Revolution that allowed the electronic spreadsheet to flourish. This included wide-scale deregulation and other […]

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.3: Data Packets for Dollars

Using the new X.25 series of packet-switching protocols embraced by the ITU, banks developed extensive international networks and clearinghouse systems to offer information services for the movement of credit information and money and to settle accounts. The supranational fund of electronic eurodollars that emerged out of the OPEC surpluses of the 1970s’ oil crises an provided an important step to the global Internet as the packet-switched technology was implemented in banking networks to coordinate the resultant flows of international currency exchange and debt.

How IT Came to Rule the World, 2.2: Eurodollars, Petrodollars

How did this world of global digital monetarism emerge? How did fluid capital transcend the containment policies and boundaries erected in the period up to 1970s to develop in the 1980s and beyond into a global financial environment where computerized algorithmic trading have created complex high transactional volume markets for an array of currency derivatives, stock index futures, CDOs and other computer based financial instruments?