Financial futures faced moral rather than practical barriers in the late 1960s.

Evidence

Plywood and shrimp did not, however, seem to guarantee a genuine revival of the Board of Trade and the Merc, and in the late 1960s a more radical departure began to be canvassed: financial futures. They could serve the same interlocked interests in hedging and speculation as agricultural futures did, but their pursuit encountered barriers that were essentially moral, like the earlier barriers to life insurance (Zelizer 1979). — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera, 634

Categorization

• XREF: The moral-barrier framing echoes the reader’s other work on silence and on dress moral panics — moral objections to new market instruments function like moral panics over immodesty; also connects to Zelizer’s work on life insurance. — connects to: Pre-1970s options were stigmatized as speculation and market manipulation tools. — Donald MacKenzie, An Engine, Not a Camera: How Financial…, 523; New derivatives markets initially lacked liquidity and depended on founders’ moral suasion to survive — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 84
• DEFINE: Establishes the key distinction that financial futures’ defining obstacle was moral legitimacy, not technical feasibility.

Broader Connections

• New derivatives markets initially lacked liquidity and depended on founders’ moral suasion to survive #corroborates (0.85) — Donald MacKenzie & Yuval Millo, Constructing a Market, Performing Theory, 84