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.Terry was one of the early women to come to our pits, hold herground with the male traders, and learned economics from the bottom up.As I stated in the book, Terry was smart enough to parlay her acquired trad-ing skills into a career as a superb national business newscaster.Similarly,my personal friend and former bridge partner Carol (Mickey) Norton, whowas the first lady trader at the IMM indeed, the first in futures markets. P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABCc13 JWBT139-Melamed June 25, 2009 13:11 Printer Name: Courier Westford136 Messenger from the FuturesShe too never gave an inch in the male-dominated world of futures, andbecame one of the outstanding traders of the era.Yes, in our markets, the trophy goes not to the Catholic or the Jew,not to the white or the black, not to the man or the woman, it goes tothose who understand the economic principles of supply and demand.No,it is not utopia yet, but in Chicago s financial markets it is not what youare your personal pedigree, your family origin, your physical infirmities,your gender but your ability to determine what the customer wants andwhere the market is headed.Little else matters.As an eight-year old sitting on that Trans-Siberian train and staring outthe window for days on end, I could no more imagine the course my lifewould take that I would escape to the futures than I can today discernwhat the world will be like, say, 50 years from now.We are all captives ofevents and circumstances over which we have so little control.In my case,fortune was most generous.It offered me the opportunity to partake inthe American miracle.And if this refugee has in any small way contributedto the precepts of Thomas Jefferson and principles of Adam Smith, he ishumbled, but it is not to his credit.He is after all but a product of hisparents, his education, and his experiences. P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABCc14 JWBT139-Melamed June 25, 2009 13:12 Printer Name: Courier WestfordCHAPTER14The Need for Futures Marketsin an Emerging World Economy he Mediterranean is the ocean of the past, the Atlantic the ocean ofTthe present and the Pacific the ocean of the future, so said John Hay,the American Secretary of State at the turn of the century.While it cancertainly be argued that the future took its good time in getting here, makeno mistake, the future of the Pacific Rim has arrived.Today, the countries of the Pacific Rim represent a combination of de-veloped and developing nations that jointly embody an economic forceequal to any region of the world. Today, states John Naisbitt, in hisMegatrends 2000, the Pacific Rim is undergoing the fastest period of eco-nomic expansion in history, growing at five times the growth rate during theindustrial revolution. The geographic area involved is as large as it is diverse.By its all-inclusive definition, it accounts for two-fifths of the world s surface andnearly half of the world s population.By any standard, the nations thatencompass the Pacific Rim are dissimilar in many fundamental respects,with differences ranging from culture to political systems to economic or-ders.Their differences also run the gamut from those, in the words of theEconomist, that are as rich and stable as Japan and as poor and turbu-lent as China, as big and open as America and as small and closed asNorth Korea. Japan is, of course, the financial colossus of region encompassing a vastand complex business infrastructure which includes some of the world slargest securities firms and banks.Australia and New Zealand provide theanchor on the South.Australia, almost as large as the continental U.S., ismore British than Asian but its location makes it imperative for the continentPresented at the Future of Fund Management in India 1998, Second Annual Confer-ence, Mumbai, India, April 16 17, The Taj Mahal Hotel.137 P1: OTA/XYZ P2: ABCc14 JWBT139-Melamed June 25, 2009 13:12 Printer Name: Courier Westford138 Messenger from the Futuresto think Asian.The newly industrialized countries, or NICs as they aresometimes called, include Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, and Taiwan.Hong Kong, of course, will revert back to China in 1997 and become anuncommon segment of this vast and underdeveloped giant.Then there arethe members of the Association of South East Asian Nations, which includeIndonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand.Although there are many ties other than geographical between thesenations, for the purposes of this publication there is a sufficient commondenominator based on a similar economic evolution which brought someof these states to employ or consider employing the markets of futures andoptions.While their current experience with these markets is of recent vin-tage, as most learned observers are aware, futures markets are nothing newto the region.Indeed, it was in Japan during the Edo period (1600 1867)that centralized futures markets were born.The place was Osaka, wherefeudal lords established warehouses to store and sell rice that was paid tothem as land tax by their villagers.In 1730, to protect themselves from wideprice fluctuations between harvests, these merchants established the DojimaRice Market, the first organized futures exchange.Over the span of the next 200 years, there were from time to time somesmall agriculturally based futures markets in Japan.However, it was notuntil the birth of the Sidney Futures Exchange (SFE) in 1960 that futuresagain made their presence felt in the Pacific Rim.The SFE was also the firstAsian futures exchange to launch a financial contract in 1979.Then came thecritical catalyst in the modern development of futures and options markets inthe Pacific basin; it was the revolutionary link in 1984 between Singapore sSIMEX and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME).This innovation servedto spur the race for financial futures dominance in the region.A year later,Japan re-entered the futures markets arena in a meaningful fashion when theTokyo Stock Exchange (TSE) launched its successful Japanese GovernmentBond contract.This important event was quickly followed by the inceptionof futures trading at the Osaka Securities Exchange (OSE) and the birth ofthe Tokyo International Financial Futures Exchange (TIFFE).There was nostopping the process now.The community of nations of the Pacific Rim hadfully embraced the financial futures revolution.Nor could it be otherwise.The vibrancy and native talent of Pacific-based populations, the wealth achieved as a consequence of decades ofsuccessful manufacturing and export, the resulting potential of their finan-cial centers, all combined to make the region a vast store of financial strengthand a force equal to any in the world.This expanding base of capital mar-kets could not continue very long or compete on a global scale withoutthe development of futures markets
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