ABSTRACT
The building housing the Chicago Board of Trade, the world’s most important futures market, is topped by a faceless cast-aluminum statue of Ceres, the Roman goddess of agriculture. The statue is said to have been left faceless by the building constructors in the 1930s because nobody would be able to see the statue’s face from street level anyway. However, the faceless statue suggests a deeper feature of markets, namely their anonymity. Underneath the apparent confusion and turmoil of the frantic transactions taking place in the big commodity trading pits of the Board, a smooth, well-regulated, albeit cryptic, market process is supposed to be occurring. The individuals who make up the market do not control this process, although they must endure its impersonal forces. At the same time, individual agents are liberated from personal responsibility toward any larger social goals, and are free to pursue narrow self-interest as they carry out their daily transactions.
