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In 1848, the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT), the world's first futures exchange, was formed. Trading was originally in forward contracts; the first contract (on corn) being written on March 13, 1851. In 1865, standardized futures contracts were introduced. The Chicago Produce Exchange was established in 1874, renamed in 1898 the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). In 1972 the International Monetary Market (IMM), a division of the CME, was formed to offer futures contracts in foreign currencies: British pound, Canadian dollar, German mark, Japanese yen, Mexican peso, and Swiss franc. Later in the 1970s saw the development of the financial futures contracts, which allowed trading in the future value of interest rates. These (in particular the 90-day Eurodollar contract introduced in 1981) had an enormous impact on the development of the interest rate swap market. Today, the futures markets have far outgrown their agricultural origins. With the addition of the New York Mercantile Exchange (NYMEX) the trading and hedging of financial products using futures dwarfs the traditional commodity markets, and plays a major role in the global financial system, trading over 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars per day in 2005. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Board_of_Trade