Onion Futures Act
42
MENTIONS
15
EPISODES
14
PODCASTS
Search complete. 42 mentions across 15 episodes found for "Onion Futures Act".
Nov 3, 2026
Tarek MansourGUEST
Illegal? Illegal.
Tarek MansourGUEST
Look at the Onion Act.
Tarek MansourGUEST
No, there's no way.
Tarek MansourGUEST
You're going to find if the Onion Act is going to be repealed.
Tarek MansourGUEST
If you look at Wikipedia, Onion Act.
Tarek MansourGUEST
You know why? So onion is the only vegetable where it's illegal to have a future on in America.
Tarek MansourGUEST
Why is that? No, just do Onion Act.
Tarek MansourGUEST
Yeah.
Mary Pat CampbellHOST
And evidently the city of Philadelphia wants to cover subprime mortgages in some way, but I need to do some more research on that.
Mary Pat CampbellHOST
And then also the Onion Futures Act.
Mary Pat CampbellHOST
Some students at the University of Chicago were protesting that.
Mary Pat CampbellHOST
So I want to talk about those, but I'm not talking about that today because we have a different kind of operational risk, both from the side of the voters and and the Board of Elections.
Tracy V. WilsonHOST
And I'm Holly Frey.
Tracy V. WilsonHOST
A few weeks ago, I was on vacation with some friends, and one of my friends asked the room if we had ever heard of the Onion Futures Act.
Tracy V. WilsonHOST
None of us had.
Tracy V. WilsonHOST
His synopsis of this was wild, and then the conversation that followed it became very silly, and I emailed myself just the words Onion Futures Act, and then I returned to being on vacation.
Tracy V. WilsonHOST
And now we have an episode about the Onion Futures Act.
Holly FreyHOST
And the whole wacky story of the Onion Futures Act only makes sense if you have an understanding of what futures are, at least in a basic sense.
Holly FreyHOST
So futures are essentially contracts.
Holly FreyHOST
They're agreements to buy or sell something at a specific price on a future date.
Matt LevineHOST
Oh, yeah.
Matt LevineHOST
There's a very funny University of Chicago student protest movement against the Onion Futures Act, which is like, there's an Onion Futures Act in like 1955.
Matt LevineHOST
Some guys... cornered the onion futures and people got so mad that Congress passed a law saying there's no more onion futures trading.
Matt LevineHOST
And I think at the time, like the CFTC or maybe even the predecessor to this, this is a long time ago, testified and were like, no, you should just let people trade onion futures.
Wes RothHOST
They did the research with suppliers.
Wes RothHOST
They were ready to lock in the contract until another staffer stepped in to tell the models they would fall afoul of the 1958 quirk of U.S. law, the Onion Futures Act.
Wes RothHOST
If you're wondering if it's a real thing, it is a real thing.
Wes RothHOST
The AI models quickly backed it down and they didn't want to pursue anything that had any regulatory risk.
Sheel MohnotHOST
Okay, so this is a really fun one.
Sheel MohnotHOST
The University of Chicago, God bless them, they have a bunch of students who've been protesting outside the Chicago Mercantile Exchange demanding repeal of the Onion Futures Act of 1958.
Sheel MohnotHOST
And the group calls themselves For Our Futures.
Sheel MohnotHOST
And it's led by current undergraduate students at Chicago.
Sheel MohnotHOST
And then they reversed their positions and they took short exposure and they flooded the market with onions, which caused the prices to collapse.
Sheel MohnotHOST
And and then all these farmers unfortunately suffered crazy losses.
Sheel MohnotHOST
And and then Congress and Gerald Ford passed the Onion Futures Act banning futures trading in onions.
Sheel MohnotHOST
which is kind of crazy because why didn't they just target manipulation of markets as a whole? Why did they ban futures trading in onions? It doesn't really make sense to me.
Rob HadickHOST
But he's been among probably the most vocal person that's been against everything happening in trading the last year.
Tarun ChitraHOST
Including our favorite on this show, which I think, Rob, you're going to be in YouTube, but Onion Futures.
Tarun ChitraHOST
Onion Futures.
Robert LeshnerHOST
Oh, yeah.
Robert LeshnerHOST
I saw that people were protesting Onion Futures and trying to get the banner revoked.
Tarun ChitraHOST
I don't know if you know this, Rob, but this has been Tom's pet project.
Tarun ChitraHOST
In my mind.
Tarun ChitraHOST
I think of him as the Onion Futures guy forever.
Ricky HaybergHOST
Really stunk the place up.
Elliot DewberryHOST
Student group sponsored by Kalshi protests Onion Futures Act at Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Elliot DewberryHOST
Okay, so...
Ricky HaybergHOST
So the thing about these prediction markets is they're built upon an existing form of investment, which like for all of history up until like two years ago was based out of Chicago.
Tarek MansourGUEST
So there was two types of commodity traders that are banned.
Tarek MansourGUEST
Onion Futures, which I can tell you the story, there was a wild story.
Tarek MansourGUEST
The second one is Box Office Futures.
Tarek MansourGUEST
Box Office Futures in 2010, there was an exchange that was trying to bring them to light, which is an idea to do a price discovery on how successful a movie is going to be beforehand.
Carmel CrimminsHOST
Is it A, sunflower seeds, B, onions, or C, carrots? And the answer is B, onions.
Carmel CrimminsHOST
The 1958 Onion Futures Act was passed after two traders cornered the market in physical onions and onion futures contracts listed on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.
Carmel CrimminsHOST
After hoarding supply, they flooded the market and shorted it, causing prices to plummet so low that a 50-pound bag of onions became worth less than the empty sack.
Carmel CrimminsHOST
The crash bankrupted many onion farmers, leading to public outrage and lobbying that resulted in the 1958 ban.
5 more episodes mention Onion Futures Act.
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