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Just a little bit of history I ran across today, first on Wikipedia but here from a Greenspan speech in 1997.
Nice. It's not hard to imagine our congressclowns trying to do this sort of thing again, either with gold or oil, or both. Probably with similar disastrous results.
The first recorded instance of federal government regulation of derivatives was the Anti-Gold Futures Act of 1864, which prohibited the trading of gold futures. The government had been unhappy that its fiat currency issues, the infamous greenbacks, were at that time trading at a substantial discount to gold. Unwilling to accept this result as evidence of failure of the government's monetary policies, Congress concluded that it was evidence of a serious failure of private market regulation. In the event, Congress's action was followed by a further sharp drop in the value of the greenbacks. Although it took the government many years to restore monetary policy to a sound footing, it took Congress only two weeks to conclude that its prohibition of gold futures was having unintended consequences and to repeal the act.
Nice. It's not hard to imagine our congressclowns trying to do this sort of thing again, either with gold or oil, or both. Probably with similar disastrous results.
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