Chicago’s options-market culture aided the Anglo-American capital-market model’s global ascent

Evidence

The historic clash between the capital-market-based systems of the United States and the United Kingdom and the relationship-based financial systems of continental Europe and Japan (see, e.g., Zysman 1983) has not yet ended in a decisive victory for the former, but the recent trend has been in that direction, and the transplantation of Chicago culture has been part of the process. There is even an intriguing personal connection between the CBOE and the rapprochement between left liberalism/social democracy and the financial markets so prominent in the 1990s. Robert Rubin, Clinton’s treasury secretary, was a member of the CBOE’s original board. — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 178

Categorization

• CANDY: The Robert Rubin-CBOE founding-board connection is a small, tweetable curiosity linking the derivatives revolution to Clinton-era financial liberalization.