Federal officials announced on Monday that all perpetual futures contracts must now be traded by hand, on paper slips, in the open air of every public park in the country, twenty-four hours a day, with no closing bell and no scheduled end.
The directive, issued by a newly created Office for Continuous Settlement, requires each municipal park to erect a trading pit with a minimum of forty chalkboards. Staff at the office said the pits must remain staffed without interruption, and that a trader who leaves for lunch is considered to have defaulted on a position he has not yet taken.
« Perpetuity is not a metaphor, » said the office's deputy director, Gerald Lennox, standing beside a half-built pit in Fairmont Park. « The contract has no expiry, so the floor has no closing. We have simply taken the logic to its natural conclusion. »
Local councils have been ordered to suspend garbage collection, school recess and municipal bus routes to free up space for the pits. Residents of several towns reported that their gardens had been claimed for margin desks, and that a man in Ohio was assigned to the overnight shift for a contract he had never heard of.
Wall Street firms, which were consulted only after the order was published, have asked for a grace period of ninety years to hire enough runners to carry the slips between parks.