A closer look
Trading futures contracts on raw onions is explicitly illegal in the United States because two incredibly greedy traders cornered the entire market in the mid-1950s and ruined the national supply chain; Vincent Kosuga and Sam Seigel bought up 98 percent of all available onions in Chicago, artificially manipulated the prices to astronomical highs, and then deliberately crashed the market to make millions by short-selling, leaving desperate farmers completely bankrupt and forcing the federal government to pass the Onions Futures Act of 1958, a real piece of legislation banning financial speculation on this specific vegetable, which perfectly illustrates how unregulated financial markets will inevitably lead to sociopathic millionaires playing Russian roulette with the global food supply just to buy another yacht
