Innovation in finance is nothing new, but it still crops up in surprising ways. Osaka’s rice exchange at Dojima invented the futures market. Individual futures contracts go back through time, all the way to the Sumerians, but never before had these been organized in a rules-based market, enabling those contracts to become money. The ideas behind Chicago’s derivatives markets – and today’s crypto derivatives venues – were invented by seventeenth-century rice merchants in Japan.
Join Jame DiBiasio on this brief exploration of the Dojima Rice Exchange.
