Man of the Futures

The Story of Leo Melamed and the Birth of Modern Finance

Leo Melamed

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780857197498
• Topic: Negocios y empresa
• Subtopic: Biografías de negocios

As the founder of financial futures and initiator of Globex, the world's first global electronic trading system, Leo Melamed revolutionized the finance industry. Man of the Futures, his definitive memoir, recounts Melamed's journey from Holocaust survivor and accidental runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME), to one of the most prominent leaders in the world of finance.At 33, Melamed gave up a promising law career to pursue his dream of becoming a full-time pit-trader at the CME. He quickly ascended the ranks to become chairman. From there, he set out to disrupt the status quo and ultimately transform both the exchange itself and the broader finance industry. Through daring to embrace innovative ideas many considered absurd, Melamed was a pioneer, continually fighting for modernisation in the financial markets through diversification and the introduction of new technologies. Covering the internal battles waged within the CME, the launch of the International Monetary Market (IMM) and the rise of Globex, this enthralling autobiography details the struggles, scandals and triumphs of a visionary in his field.Together with behind-the-scenes reminiscences about the financial markets, this narrative delves into Melamed's philanthropic work at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, as well as his fascinating dealings with political figures at home in Chicago, at the White House, and around the world in China, Japan, Singapore, Great Britain, Russia, South Korea, and Brazil. Man of the Futures offers exclusive access to the rationale behind some of the biggest financial decisions and dealings in the late 20th and early 21st century. Join Leo Melamed for this fascinating and revealing story of a life lived in pursuit of the future.

Chapter 1

My Parents, Moishe and
Faygl Melamdovich

We were on the Trans-Siberian Express on our way to Vladivostok, Russia’s most eastern seaport, when my father sat me down to explain the difference between Fahrenheit and centigrade. I was eight years old. We were not on a holiday excursion. We were on a critical leg of our escape from the horrors unfolding in Europe at the outset of the second world war.4

Before the bombing began, my father moved us to his family’s brick building, near the outskirts of Bialystok, Poland, the city where I was born and where he said it would be safer. To protect us against bombing, he used black paint to cover the windows.

I was sitting in a barber’s stool when we heard someone outdoors shout in Yiddish: “Lost arop di zaluzjan, der gast is do.” Close the grating the guests are here!

When we got home, I secretly took a key to scratch out a little peephole for myself through which I saw the first German tanks roll in to capture Bialystok and all its inhabitants. To a seven-year-old, they were huge monsters from an alien world—an image I will always remember.

Before the tanks came, my mother woke me in the middle of one night to say farewell to my father. It was known that the Nazis used prominent people as hostages and my father was one of 20 (or so) Bialystok council members who were in particular danger. At a council meeting it was explained that the mayor had made arrangements for a truck to take them away.

This meeting was held in the great synagogue, because the City Hall had been bombed out. The mayor had asked the chief rabbi of Bialystok, Gedalja Rozenman, for permission to hold the meeting, and was granted the request with the stipulation that everyone wear a yarmulke (skull cap) or a hat, as was the religious custom. Everyone agreed except my father. He was the only Jew elected to the council, but he was also an ardent member of the Bund, the secular Jewish socialist party. As such, he was an agnostic. Wearing a yarmulke would violate his principles.5 The rabbi looked the other way.

I remember how tightly my mother held my hand as we ran through the darkness—interrupted only by flashes of light from the falling bombs and the constant ack-ack sound coming from what I later learned were machine guns. A tearful farewell scene followed in an empty lot with but one lonely truck.

When the Gestapo came a week later, my father was not there and we truthfully had no idea where he was. The ordeal became my first horrifying memory, one that has haunted me throughout my life. There were three of them. I remember their boots. They ransacked our house and slapped my mother around. One thought is indelibly seared in my memory—my mother never cried nor let go of my hand.

The Russian dance

Several weeks later, Bialystok was turned over to the Russians, as part of the non-aggression treaty between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.

All of the city officials who had run in the face of German occupation now returned. To many, the Russians were a safer occupier than the Nazis, especially for Jews. It was a sad, life-or-death mistake—one not made by my father. As he later explained to my mother, he did not return because the Bolsheviks were not to be trusted. “Besides,” he said, “the machinations between Hitler and Stalin were to be regarded as those of madmen.”

Sure enough, within days we were confronted by the NKVD (precursors of the KGB) and at the time, the only difference I could discern between them and the Gestapo was that they were in plain clothes and not wearing boots. All those who returned to Bialystok were arrested and never heard from again. Oddly, while not very prominent in the Bund hierarchy, my father was known enough to be included as an ‘enemy of the state’ by the Communist party. He had sympathized with a small group of Bundist loyalists in Bialystok who wrested the Jewish trade unions from communist control, restoring them to the influence of Jewish Socialism under the Bund banner.

What possessed my father to take flight and not return? What possessed him several weeks later to call a neighbor and direct my mother to get the last train that very night out of Bialystok to Vilnius (Vilna in Yiddish)? How did he know that Vilna would be turned over to the Lithuanians the next day and would therefore be safer? How did he know? Why Lithuania? What possessed my parents to leave their house, jobs as schoolteachers, relatives, friends and all possessions? And to go—where? There was no destination. And this was before anyone in the world knew of the Holocaust.

Later in life, when I asked my father the question, “What made you do it?” he shrugged and just said it was an instinctive reaction. “Something you feel certain is the right thing to do.”

The escape

That night was the beginning of our escape from Bialystok and the scourge that would befall the unfortunate souls who remained. My mother grabbed me and some bare necessities and made our goodbyes as if we would be back in a couple of days.

The train station was in chaos, with people shouting and running back and forth. Everyone was rushing but seemingly without a destination. We barely made it. The next 12 hours were a nightmare. My mother and I spent the night pressed against each other like sardines in a can. Somehow, she managed to steal a cardboard box from a grizzled old man for me to sit on. He alternated between smiling at me and giving me dirty looks in case I stole something.

The train stopped countless times, causing everyone to rush out in fear that it would be bombed. After the whistle blew again—an all-clear signal—everyone rushed back on the train to find their spot. No one argued about it. People seemed amazingly polite, but there were babies who never stopped crying. The journey, which normally took a couple of hours, lasted all night. It was my first sleepless night.

Jews in Bialystok

Jewish history in Bialystok can be traced back to the 1500s. Their presence swelled over the years and in the 1700s, Count Jan Branicki gave Jews full-citizenship status. It was a historic event. Nevertheless, the Bialystok Jewish population was consistently subjected to waves of anti-Semitism and pogroms. The most well-known occurred on June 1, 1906, with more than 200 Jews killed and hundreds injured, along with the destruction of homes and businesses. For three whole days, June 1 to 3, 1906, Czarist murders ravaged the people and property of the Jewish community. Ironically, the police chief was a liberal and afterwards he declared “there will be no [more] pogrom in Bialystok.” (Nice try, Count Branicki.)

Bialystok could boast of some very distinguished personalities, such as Icchok Shamir, who served as prime minister of Israel, and Dr. Ludwik L. Zamenhof, the inventor of the international language Esperanto. It was fitting that the founder of Esperanto was a Jew from Bialystok, a place where Jews encountered many ethnic groups and languages—Polish, Russian, German, Lithuanian, White Russian, as well as Yiddish and Hebrew. Dr. Albert B. Sabin, a microbiologist who improved the Salk polio vaccine by developing an oral equivalent, was also a Bialystoker. And, of course, Max Ratner of Cleveland Ohio, a most distinguished Bialystoker, who was a prosperous industrialist and leading philanthropist on the American-Jewish scene. Samuel Pisar, a renowned Parisian lawyer who spent his adolescence in Auschwitz, was also a Bialystoker.

Bialystok also thrived as a center of the Jewish labor movement, a revolutionary arena that produced many prominent personalities and writers. As early as 1882, 70 Jewish Bundist weavers went out on strike against the factory owner. This stoppage set a precedent for other job actions over wage disputes. However, more than the weavers, politicians and distinguished citizens, it was the bakers of Bialystok who achieved worldwide fame with their bialy, a breakfast roll.

The grim truth

In 1939, just before the Germans invaded Poland, there were 110,000 Jews living in Bialystok, re...