Why was the law against onion futures passed in the first place? Couldn’t the same scheme be done with garlic, or sweet potatoes, or turnips or something?
They also got onion farmers to buy back onions they'd already sold.
That paid off in a concentrated lock on the bulk of rare earth applications.
Well, you'd think, but squeezing the CTD bond was completely accepted practice well into the noughties until PIMCO flew too close to the sun and faced regulatory wrath.
We don’t complain about switch cases in code when there is two or three switches we start refactoring once it starts to proliferate.
The law is no different , passing a wider ban would not get the votes easily or quickly and the interested parties the onion industry have no reason to push for it neither does the lawmaker acting on their interests.
If said small markets also had exceptions passed seeing the onion one there could have been case to be broad.
It would premature optimization to otherwise, based on just need for elegance , code or law has to work first even if dirty .
And therefore, yes, it was a silly, political reaction.
The answer is it is difficult to say. One thing anyone cornering the market has to consider is government intervention. In this respect onions are perfect. They are merely a condiment. Nobody is going to starve for lack of onions if the rest of the food supply is intact. Thus any government official rushing in to intervene in a cornering of the onion market will look a little foolish and thus think twice about it.
If someone tried to corner the wheat market the government is likely to step in, confiscate his goods and pay him a fair price for his wheat which will be much lower than the cornered price. The cornerer will then lose money.
I suspect the congressman that passed the legislation did his research and talked to all potentially affected parties. I suspect the farmers and ranchers producing the other traded commodities said that this was not really a concern for them and that they would prefer that their commodities continue to be traded.
Shall we address the general question of privacy, or just close the particular breach that affected a congressman? You know it's going to be the latter.
Legislative product management, by committee.
A direct democracy might have just banned all futures.
It is a lot harder to corner the market when you have very non-perishable or very perishable goods and/or much larger domestic and global markets with harvests that vary across geography and time, like wheat and frozen orange juice concentrate. Most goods traded via futures have those properties. Onions is right on the edge of even making sense as a futures commodity, and because of that, it's a recipe for manipulation.
And there were calls to regulate potatoes the same way in the fallout of the onion market manipulation, but those didn't pass, and in 1976 the potato market was almost cornered in the same way.
But sure, govment bad.
As I wrote in a previous comment on this thread I am sure the congressman that passed the law discussed the issue with farmers and ranchers producing all traded commodities and the ones that were not growing onions did not think there was a significant risk of a corner and they preferred to have their goods traded.
Although I do agree with you that privacy protections should be broader. As far as Megan’s law I am sure you realize that it is intended to protect everyone from sex criminals not just people named Megan.