Today it is possible to buy and sell cattle, 40,000 pounds at a time, from a computer screen through the cattle futures market. The practice has been around for about a century now, but for a short period (1918-1919) the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) was renamed as the New York Livestock Exchange because stock traders shared the floor with living, breathing livestock.
No one could predict the impact that the homecoming of thousands of soldiers at the end of World War I would have on the demand for cattle meat and leather. The cattle industry had been in dire straits for two decades and industry leaders wanted solutions to stabilize the market.
The decision to make live livestock trading available at the Exchange floor was mostly a personal decision by Gordon Logic, then the managing director at the NYSE, as a favor to a friend who had lost several barns in a fire. Regarding his decision to add dozens of mooing, clucking, and defecating animals to the floor, he gave an apprehensive response:
“Most traders loved the idea of being able to buy livestock in small quantities but for all the wrong reasons. Most regarded it as a cheap and convenient way to get a live chicken at “market” prices. They’d drive down the price so that they could purchase all of them at a cent or two a pound, then magically the price would skyrocket the next day. They’d all say the same, sexist thing the next morning: ‘My wife’s a great cook and does whatever I tell her to do, but I wish she wasn’t such a heifer.”
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You don't hear about this that often. Must be a NYSE coverup...
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