If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
I think the main reason is that they were all too incompetent to realize what the effects of the war would be on the global financial system. The bets were probably just a happy opportunity for corruption.
> The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt
Look on the bright side, at least the malicious actors aren't able to competently implement their goals.
The economic effects impact the rest of the world much more than the US, which may have been somebody's planning point, although on the surface they seem to be too stupid to come up with this idea.
The US/North America is petroleum-product-independent-ish. We produce approximately as much hydrocarbons as we use. We also could produce a lot more but tar sands, shale oil, etc. are more expensive to produce and not very profitable at $60/bbl but it's there ready for the taking. When you're talking about how we aren't it's about how certain refineries are tuned for which type of oil and how we import unrefined and export the refined products, etc... but we're not RUNNING OUT of oil or energy.
Many places in the rest of the world aren't like that and will suffer much greater losses while the US is relatively strong. Of course we're all linked, but a power hungry dictator might only really care who's on top in a relative sense even if everybody is dragged down.
Getting yourself installed as president while knowing you are incompetent (I mean, look at all those bankrupt businesses, he should know) is nefarious in itself. His entourage is nefarious for supporting the incompetency for their own gain.
One of the few conspiracy theories I kinda believe is that Trump's 2016 presidential run was a grift and he expected to lose.
Everything since has just been an inability to admit he was in over his head, plus trying to get out of trouble for all the crimes he did. He (and Clinton) just underestimated how susceptible the US was to a demagogue. If you look at his face after the win was announced on election night, and after the first meeting with Obama for the transition, I think it shows plainly on his face.
If you're incompetent maybe you don't know you're incompetent? I think probably a lot of people told him, but he's also very stubborn, so. He's been rocking that god fucking awful spray tan for decades now.
I mean, Christ, we have good spray tans, I know we do.
Isn't the problem that they can't end the war unilaterally? The Iranian regime is justifiably pissed off and is still flinging drones and rockets towards any viable target, and any ceasefire will be with acceptance of their terms. The Trump/Netanyahu collection of dumb ego won't be able to accept being dictated terms.
So like in Game of Thrones, we hope a Jamie Lannister shows up...
This was my thought as well. Trump today claims he had long discussions with Iranian leadership over the weekend and Iran claims such a thing never happened.
Not only is Iran justifiably angry at its attackers, they have no reason to trust a ceasefire would be respected, and, furthermore, despite damage taken, stand to gain quite a lot if the war progresses as it has. Currently Iran is exporting more oil than ever before[0]. If the war continues as is they stand to emerge a much, much more dominant power on the world stage. Essentially being to BRICS what the GCC countries have been to the US (although much better defended).
Even the threats against their energy infrastructure can't really be backed up effectively. Iran has intentionally built its energy infrastructure to be highly distributed. Meanwhile Israel's infrastructure is highly centralized, with a small number of power plants providing massive proportions of the nations infrastructure. All this meaning that Iran can retaliate much more effectively the they can be harmed.
In the enlightened POTUS' own words (yes, he wrote in all caps):
> I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
I think one way to understand Trump is that he is a compulsive and successful gaslighter. Behaviorally, he is a very interesting case for psychologists. He should be in future textbooks as a case study.
The bet amounts are small relative to the political scandal that would follow top administration officials who have decision making power.
If there is insider trading it's most likely low-level staffers or friends of officials who speak too freely.
If a high ranking official wanted to make a lot of money on these moves in an untraceable way, there are numerous financial market opportunities. The amount they could make on betting markets is peanuts and too easily tracked.
She should have been tied to a wooden post and shipped out of DC on an uncovered railcar for labelling a peaceful protester assassinated by ICE a "domestic terrorist".
Her scandal was not being subtle enough with the theft of government funds for Trump's taste, and he found a way to get rid of her that he could claim he had no part in.
I dont see the us empire recovering. This is in the starting / middle of a collapse. If any additional crises pop up inconjunction to this we are going to fall like the bronze age collapse
We've been through this already, someone placed a $30k bet (payout around $400k) that Maduro will leave office by the end of January hours before the US raid took place.
Have you noticed any meaningful scandals back then?
That would be darkly hilarious, but I think it could also be the opposite way around: That there is a ceasefire shaping up, and some of Trump's staffers couldn't hold it anymore and placed bets using their knowledge - therefore accidentally "leaking" the plans.
The article isn’t implying that Trump is going to seek a ceasefire because of some puny bets on Polymarket, it’s implying that someone (or multiple people) close to Trump heard he was considering a ceasefire and placed a bet before Trump posted about it and the odds went up. Or they at least knew that him posting about it would affect the ours enough to make money, whether he plans to negotiate a ceasefire for real.
He's made billions in just crypto schemes. Then the bribes to pardon people. It just gles on and on. He never provided evidence that he didn't accept the salary, just said he donated it to federal agencies, which you cannot even do.
Note that in addition to specific programs that accept donations, this list includes "Gifts to the U.S. Government" with no strings attached and "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt".
It's not really up to the US and Israel when this war of choice ends anymore. It's up to Iran. And Iran, justifiably, is going to demand their pound of flesh. That could require some combination of ending the (criminal) sanctions, de-militarizing the Gulf and reining in Israel.
The problem is all of these things are politically untenable. This is the only reason why I think this war could continue long term because Trump simply cannot back down.
I think the recession from this could actually get so bad that there's now a nonzero (but still small) chance Trump gets removed from office, either by impeachment or by being 25A'ed.
It is hard to adequately state what a geopolitical disaster this was and it is I think quite easily the biggest mistake by an administration in the entire history of the US. I'm not exaggerating.
Still nowhere near as bad as the Vietnam war. Arguably not even as big a mistake as the CIA coup against Mossadegh, which is the poisoned tree from which the present situation grows.
I wonder how the coup in Cuba will turn out. That has to happen before the midterms, and he's unlikely to wait for Iran to resolve.
I think is a worse disaster than Vietnam. Why? Because the Vietnam War was localized. It was devastating to the people who got drafted and obviously devastating to the Vietnamese as well as the Cambodians that Nixon and Kissinger decidedly to relentless bomb for literally no reason. There was internal dissent but that was, saldy, quashed quite successfully.
The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.
This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.
The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.
That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.
Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.
Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.
There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.
So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.
Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.
While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.
The Arab allies are going to be plenty pissed if US leaves without degrading Iran. They were doing fine before the US intervened, now they are worse of than they were before.
The Arab allies (aka client states) thought they had a lot more influence over America than they really do; it just happened that a lot of their asks aligned with Israel's asks. When push comes to shove and America has to choose between satisfying Israeli interests or the Arab states, not both at the same time, they're going to become disappointed. Both want Iran dealt with, but I think the tension will reach a breaking point over what the final result is meant to be. Israel would love for Iran to be a failed state like Somalia, as mentioned above, with a power vacuum they can fill and huge amounts of refugees streaming out and destabilizing their neighbors. The Arab states obviously don't want that, they want Iran stabilized with a compliant predictable government. There is approximately a zero percent chance of that happening, so they're going to be sorely disappointed.
One complication is that the sheiks are heavily invested in US tech companies and Kushner's ilk is heavily invested in the Middle East. So neither would want the other to crash and burn but can use the threat of financial pull out as a weapon.
The amount of money to be made on these markets is in the tens of millions at best. This administration doesn’t care about that. I understand why you feel that way, the numbers are just too inconsequential to even move the needle.
Bit players with knowledge that have been perennially underpaid by the us govt. however, mortgage-saving money. I don’t blame them. Do you?
“I’m aware of a big decision and I can make 23k off of it, probably.” Do it up, congress has been living off insider trading for a century, let the little guy get theirs.
Until gambling commercials are banned in the same way cigarette commercials were banned, we’re all just yelling at the wind.
> The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.
Ben Yorke is the only expert I see mentioned in the article, so it'd be a lot more accurate (and a lot less sensational) if The Guardian changed its title to "... says one expert" (but it wouldn't sound as interesting then, would it?).
> Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire. They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.
Not to sound privileged but $800k doesn't sound like that much of money for someone that has access to that kind of insider knowledge, especially considering the risks.
All things considered, I feel like the same people could make much bigger bets using trad-fi instruments than Polymarket so I don't understand what's so significant about Polymarket "whales".
> $800k doesn't sound like that much of money for someone that has access to that kind of insider knowledge
I think you over-estimate by a large margin how much congressional staffers and/or Pentagon employees make, many of whom could have access to this kind of information in the course of their duties.
You don’t have to be an insider to know that the US wants to broker a peace deal now that they’ve gotten themselves deep in the shit. Also, how could a Washington insider know if a peace deal will actually be brokered they have to negotiate with the other party after all.
Betting on a ceasefire isn't the interesting part, placing a five digit bet on a ceasefire by March 31st using brand-new accounts is.
Do you have any other plausible explanation for this behaviour? I can't think of any, if it's just like your average WallStreetBets gambler, why would they be making these bets from brand-new accounts?
Conspiracy theories are once again gossip for men. Interestingly, you can put your money where your mouth is in this case open your own account and make your own bets since you seem convinced. might as well cash in. Which gives me an idea … if only I had enough cash sitting around…
Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? Now me, as someone who doesn’t have access to insider knowledge, can know that there’s a noticeably increased chance of what’s going to happen. I do think maybe there should be some sort of feature to prevent last minute bets that utilizes insider knowledge, and I do admit there are considerable negative externalities to this system but it’s not clear to me that this is for sure bad.
This was one of the theoretical points of betting markets.
But there are two large concrete betting markets now. And they advertise not as a "world state discovery system" but as a gambling platform for people to try their luck on. They are also large businesses that are making their owners rich. Falling back on "oh we are just interested in the intellectual exercise of information discovery" is not tenable at this point.
The same logic can be used the opposite way, you can, with large amounts of money, manipulate events or people's responses to them.
* you can place large bets on events you have influence on the outcome for and make large amounts of money
* you can place large bets on events and then threaten people who have influence with a big stick
* you can place large bets expecting to lose money in order to change the outcome or a related outcome expecting people to look at the odds and change their behavior
And probably lots of other ways.
It corrupts events and on a world stage with unethical government in vogue... it's not impossible for people to manipulate a war in order to make bets go their way.
There was recently a story about a reporter who faced threats because their reporting contained a detail that while not significantly impactful (although about a literal impact) in it's own right changed the win conditions on a prediction bet.
I think prediction markets worked as an idea to provide a wisdom of the crowd view when they were being used in good faith, but rewards cause people to prioritise winning and gaming the system pays better than playing fairly.
There is no unfairly or fairly playing a prediction market. That's kind of the point. They don't work if you try to regulate them like they are a stock market or sports betting market. If you place money on one as a layman, you should consider yourself the dumb money. Lots of folks have convinced themselves they "know better" though, so it's a very easy psychological sell.
You either allow a free for all, or they should be simply outright banned. I mean, they should probably be banned either way - but without the prediction part this is not a single redeeming factor for them to exist.
The consequences for someone betting on classified information would need to come from the agency/government/etc. that finds out their staff is engaging in betting on privileged information. The market itself is simply taking bets and doing what it's designed to do. The bettor gets to decide if the risk is worth it.
Can we at least debate the obvious externality that an insider might skew their advice or actions to personally profit instead of doing whatever they think is most appropriate for their job?
Yeah I agree that there are big negative externalities and this is one. I’m more talking about is someone with insider knowledge but not the ability to influence - is that a bad thing specifically for these type of markets?
Eh what? It’s literally the only reason for prediction markets to exist. Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
The only way you get more wisdom from “the crowd” is if it teases folks who hold non-public (or at least less public) information into the market to refine the odds towards what they should be.
Without insider information the entire concept is dead on arrival.
Yes randos are gonna gamble because they either don’t understand the game they are playing or are simple degenerate gamblers who want something else to gamble on. Others are going to think they know better or have limited insider information that isn’t worth as much as they think, or is not as accurate as they believe. And the delusional who simply think they know better for no logical reason but have convinced themselves otherwise.
> Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
People find gambling fun. Owners of gambling services make a lot of money. The prediction markets both run ads that present themselves as gambling products.
Both of these things are points that can sustain large businesses.
That would go under someone who thinks they have more information than they think they do. Perhaps you are great at mathematics and think you can estimate much better than the average bidder. The person who filled the jar is going to have even better information than you do. Or perhaps not. Maybe they miscounted or their manager added a handful before they screwed the top of the jar on.
If the market that is taking the bet also filled the jar, then sure it’s just outright fraud at that point. But the market exists to get the real information into the open. Betting that an insider just isn’t going to play is a variable you consider when placing your bet imo.
A "market" is hypothesized to be "efficient" at price discovery.
An efficient "prediction market" would more quickly resolve to its expected outcome due to not only skin-in-the-game bets by experts, but also the influence of insiders.
Furthermore, bets are likely to shape outcomes. Betting someone will be assassinated (not allowed on Polymarket) would likely increase the probability of that outcome had there been no bet at all.
I’ve heard this assassination thing said, but I don’t see it. Someone still has to kill said person and somehow profit from the unlikelihood of this outcome. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m just saying that it’s never happened and maybe never will.
There is no assassination market to test it against.
If there was, I think you'd see quite a few public figures on the list.
And I think it _would_ cause folks to die. Which is why it's banned or regulated. (I'm actually not sure what the legal status is, just that Polymarket and US prediction markets disallow it.)
Polymarket is not fully in the US and its betting on oil prices is not a CTFC-allowed market. This is after all a bet on a commodity, which is already regulated and already a product available on ICE. Technically Polymarket doesn't need to care about the assassination market rule (which is a CFTC rule for prediction markets), but I presume they adhere to it out of respect for the reasoning behind the rule.
Openly corrupt markets that feature insiders with secret knowledge taking money from gambling addicts and rubes is actually good cause the crowd is now wiser.
Unironically yes. Someone bet a mid sized amount and now we all share in that potential insider knowledge. A small scale example is my spouse said that the election odds from her home country were not realistic because all the westerners were betting a candidate would win but weren’t accounting for corruption that she felt was guaranteed to happen. Turns out she was right.
Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before.
Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping you get too big before the regulators catch up.
If athletes didn't face consequences for manipulating betting markets, I think you'd see people become less and less likely to bet on sports outcomes. People naturally don't like a rigged game, you don't have to tell them not to play it.
With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets? Because I'm not sure anyone you are moralizing at is taking up the argument that it's critical that they exist.
Sports betting is specifically not a prediction market precisely because the players are banned by both law and extreme consequences from their leagues for participating.
You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.
I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.
Couldn't insiders just trade Brent Crude futures and do the same thing? There's more than enough liquidity in Brent that an insider can make great money.
Right so how are you going to find it and who is going to prosecute the insider trading here?
My point isn't that an unregulated prediction market (Polymarket non-US markets are non-CFTC certified) can obscure insider trading. My point is that Brent has enough liquidity that an insider can trade without moving markets. There's plenty of insiders that work on a contract basis and aren't required to disclose trades by STOCK Act provisions for public disclosure.
And honestly we aren't even out of the 45 day window around disclosures that would surface any Brent or WTI trades around the current Iran conflict anyway.
People tend to use the term insider incorrectly. Even in cftc regulated markets it is unlikely that an admin official is an insider.
What people are looking for is anti-corruption enforcement not market regulation. The problem isn’t that the admin is using advanced knowledge, all commodities trading involves that, it’s that the officials have an obligation to the public as part of their governmental service.
Of course this admin _also_ gutted the anti-corruption offices in the government along with the market regulators.
If they were then that memo got lost when it reached the general populace that sees them as a gambling vehicle. I think it'd be extremely reasonable if people with qualified access to information like this were banned from leveraging it on prediction markets.
If someone has news they want to get out they can just use the media.
That more-or-less happened over the weekend [0]. Five minutes before Trump's unsurprising TACO announcement an unexpected large number of WTI futures contracts were sold and an even larger amount of S&P 500 futures were purchased.
Yes that's my point. There's this whole new angle of prurient news where articles try to use the "anynomous nature" of Polymarket to play into an a corruption story as if it's all some new, dangerous game.
But why? You can trade Brent or WTI and do the same exact thing with much less scrutiny. $800k of Brent futures is nothing, and instead of having to risk your entire bet going bust like in prediction markets and their binary outcomes you can just take a loss on your investment instead if you time your exit incorrectly.
Look, no offense here, but if you're this unaware of how oil markets work, and it seems like markets in general work, I suggest doing at least some initial googling before digesting this story.
I realize for some the whole appeal of this kind of story is "look Trump bad" and then to get into the comments about how bad he is to play political sportsball, but insider trading is sadly a bipartisan phenomenon. No question though that this admin is the most brazen about its corruption in my lifetime though.
My understanding is that an individual works through a brokerage to buy/sell securities on an exchange. The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading. In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.
What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).
I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out. I was hoping an expert would be able to enlighten us, so we can share informed opinions rather than uninformed opinions.
> In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.
Remember that even if you make USDC on Polymarket, at some point you need to turn that into spendable fiat. Even if you move USDC over to Coinbase, if you move over $800k+, there is no way your new gains will not be met with scrutiny. Once you have that much USDC and no good explanation on how you made it you essentially need to launder the money. There's low hanging fruit to spend crypto on like VPNs and compute, but there's very few ways to launder that much money easily and most importantly cheaply.
> What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).
Yeah if you search around you'll find that this is covered by the STOCK Act [1]. Pretty simple, cursory search.
> The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading.
Borkerages don't build knowledge graphs of their users and the things these users can and cannot trade even if they know who they are. If you've ever held RSUs, there are companies that put trading restrictions on your RSUs but this is a brokerage platform concept, and isn't even universal across brokerages. For the most part brokerages don't care what you make money on. This only becomes a problem if the SEC chooses enforcement action.
One of the simplest ways that insiders come under scrutiny is taking large positions that make the news or move markets (or otherwise soak up lots of liquidity.) Oil is traded in futures, which means each contract is for 1000 barrels. CBK26 right now is priced at $103.73, which means a single contract is worth $103,730. A position of $800k is a pretty standard amount in Brent (though this is a future, so you'll need to post margin which makes this more expensive.) From there it's a game of how likely it is to be caught trading and then prosecuted. If you tell nobody and come under no scrutiny you're golden; sell your position when the time comes and make $$$. Plenty of government positions, like contractors, are not required to disclose under the STOCK Act and so there's almost no likelihood those insiders will come under any scrutiny.
And unlike a Polymarket bet you don't end up making the news when you trade $800k of contracts nor will you run the risk of mistiming your bet and losing your entire bet and then go through the headache of laundering your money out.
> I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out.
No offense but this is a low bar to have. It's all a few web searches away. I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to teach you this in a few turns of conversation. What is the "appropriate" amount of knowledge we should expect an internet commenter to have? I mean posting on HN has to mean something right? Or maybe those days are gone on here.
> “For the purposes of this market, an ‘official ceasefire agreement’ requires clear public confirmation from both the United States government and the government of Iran that they have agreed to halt military hostilities against one another.” (by March 31)
Seems a rather risky bet considering how deep Israel has ventured into its war in Lebanon. Very doubtful they will stop anytime soon. Given the leverage Israel has demonstrated over US foreign policy I find it hard to imagine that the US will 'leave them to it'. Likewise, Iran is unlikely to leave Hezbollah's interests out of any negotiations or for that matter to trust that the US isn't asking for negotiations in bad faith. I guess there could be a limited ceasefire agreed between Iran and the US to make room for negotiations but the ceasefire would almost certainly have to occur without the opening of the strait or an end to fighting in Lebanon. This (now regional) war has a long way to go in my opinion.
Ultimately, I think this all hinges on whether or not the Iranians feel that they have enough leverage to exercise yet. My feeling is that they will want to continue to the point of destroying Trump's political career - something they could possibly do if this quagmire continues to get worse and closer to the US midterms. Bringing down a US president is potentially one way they can help ensure that they don't simply get attacked again in the near future.
Non-zionist Jews have been leaving Israel whenever the opportunity rose. This war was just an accelerant for further emigration.
The only ones who choose to stay back are folks fresh into Aliyah, who might've received a lot of incentives from the government to settle in the illegal West Bank settlements. Or those who really believe in Zionism. The former are typically guys who couldn't make the cut even in their home countries, so they're certainly not adequate replacements for the ones leaving.
Not to mention, it's mostly the liberal cities like Tel Aviv which have faced the brunt of Iranian barrages. Jerusalem has been barely hit. Folks staying in those cities, working actual jobs contributing to the economy and not Torah studies, are likely the ones leaving - I know many of my acquaintances who've left Tel Aviv for the US or Dubai.
I can't see it being over in a week. People seem to have not realized that the Iranian regime is large enough and possessed of enough of a sense of honor to not just surrender after a week. Plus the use of decapitation attacks makes it extremely difficult for the Iranians to talk each other down. And the US can't negotiate on behalf of Israel or bind them to not break the ceasefire, because there's a separate and much longer lasting conflict between Israel and Iran that has been going on since the revolution.
On the other hand, there is no way to "destroy Trump's career". The US system doesn't have confidence votes. You're stuck with him.
Edit: it is an unfortunate aspect of the minor World War that the Iran war has overshadowed the war in Lebanon, whatever is happening in Syria, and the weird UAE backed war in Sudan.
> ... I think this all hinges on whether or not the Iranians feel that they have enough leverage to exercise yet.
They don't have a navy anymore and they don't have fighter planes anymore. There's only so many missiles they can launch out without revealing where they're launched from. That leaves them with drones: are iranian drones really sufficient to have any leverage?
Why "yet"? As time goes on they've got less and less leverage: they're getting bombed daily. It's not as if they were producing military material faster than it's getting destroyed.
At this point the islamists in Iran (who doesn't represent all iranian people) are menacing of some kind of scorched earth strategy: where they're saying "if you don't stop destroying every military capacity we have and if you begin to moreover attack our non-military infrastructure, we'll prevent other countries in the region from... Having access to water".
I mean: it could be some leverage, but it reeks of desperation to me. They're getting their arses handed to them in this war. "We'll send drones on oil tankers" and "We'll make sure our neighbors, which we already bombed for no reason, now die of thirst" doesn't sound like a genius war strategy to me. Just like hanging iranian athletes publicly doesn't exactly inspire sympathy from the rest of the world and doesn't sound like a sound strategy either: it's obviously to "make a statement" against all the iranians who wish to see the islamists gone and a regime change, but it's not a genius strategy to gain allies among other countries.
As to Trump's political career: he's old, he cannot be president three times. He's already done 5 years and 2 months of his 8 years, that's 2/3 of his 8 years. He's seems to give absolutely zero fuck about anything since a bullet missed him: he's got 2 years and 10 months left as president and I don't see him quitting. Maybe he'll die of old age but I don't see him quitting.
As a sidenote I think we can all agree that senile-autopen-Biden wasn't exactly fit to rule the country either and yet he stayed until the end of his term, barely able to walk or to look at the correct camera. I mean: so far only one president of the US ever resigned. What are the odds that Trump would be the second one? I don't buy it.
And losing the midterms isn't "bringing down a US president": it doesn't mean a new president gets to get elected.
I get where you're coming from in a lot of ways, but the strait (edited) remains closed, and it's not just a perception issue. From this article [0]:
> U.S. officials have previously declared the Iranian Navy to have been rendered combat ineffective, but many of the more than 120 ships it has targeted so far have been larger vessels. Iran has hundreds of fast boats, some of which are armed with short-range anti-ship missiles, as well as artillery rockets and other weapons. They can also be used to lay naval mines. These fleets are inherently harder to find and fix, and do not need large ports to operate from.
Maybe that's why very few ships are still getting through. The rest of the article is a fun read about how A-10s are taking out those small boats, but there's still a whole lot of work left to do. I think Iran still has a lot of asymmetric juice left, and at some point the law of diminishing returns will kick in.
On the other hand it was a war of choice and the U.S. can make their declaration of victory look like whatever they want it to.
As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War (a much shittier book than Art of the Deal /s), always give your enemy a way out. Otherwise they will fight to their death...
Their drones are cheap easy to conceal, and can keep the straight closed indefinitely. And what other leverage do they have besides them keeping the straight closed?
> And what other leverage do they have besides them keeping the straight closed?
They also have the potential for Houthi involvement - threatening shipping in the Red Sea. In addition the Houthis or Iran themselves are more than capable of disabling Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port - shutting off a major relief valve for gulf oil exports.
In short, Iran has plenty of further escalation options (i.e. leverage). Not to mention the ongoing threat they present to Israel which I believe they are more than capable of increasing. If you doubt that, I would suggest searching for some of Ted Postol's commentary regarding Iran's missile attacks and Israel and the US's ability to defend against them. He is very dubious that they can and that the 80-90% intercept rates are in fact baloney. He does have prior form here - being essentially the only one to question patriot missile effectiveness vs scuds in the Iraq war. He claimed a full order of magnitude less effectiveness than reported (9% I believe) and was proven right.
What signs? This article is absolute slop (not AI, but slop).
I do not have any reason to doubt that people are doing insider trading. The US admin is obviously corrupt and the Iran attacks are the most abject symptom of its corruption so far.
But you can't just put out a bunch of completely isolated observations with zero analysis and say "that looks like insider trading". There is nothing at all in here that presents an argument for that claim.
I am a daily Guardian reader but I stopped paying for it coz there are so many articles like this that are just complete fucking trash. Because I am the target audience (leftist Euro who can easily get riled up by topics like this) it pisses me off when I feel I'm being manipulated.
I appreciate your perspective on this. We're living in an era of sensationalism and noise. It wont get better until a lot of people from every political disposition becomes tired of hollow words designed only to create BIG FEELINGS.
Imagine an era where the majority leans in on a balance of compassion for self and others.
> Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire.
Is that anomalous? Are these numbers large in context?
> They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.
Yes that is indeed how prediction markets work for unlikely events?
> An account that made the same bet was created shortly before the US struck Iran on 28 February. It also placed a winning bet on those strikes, which raised similar questions around insider trading, and so far has bet on nothing else.
Is that anomalous? If I was betting 5 figure sums I would also stick to my areas of expertise. That doesn't mean I'm an insider.
> The new accounts all appear to have been created late last week, around the time when the US president, Donald Trump, appeared to first double down on war with Iran, then suggest in an after-markets Truth Social post that he was considering “winding down” military operations.
So what??? Is anything about that anomalous? What is that supposed to tell us about the accounts?
> The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.
"Some random fucking guy said this thing", OK?
> But online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading – both because they bought their positions at market price,
What the fuck does that even mean?
> and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets.
This is just repeating a former claim that was not backed up with any rationale. And note the very next sentence provides an alternative motive for traders to split wallets, aside from insider trading.
> “Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading,” said Yorke.
But we haven't been presented with any evidence that we're seeing either of those things?? And also I can't help repeating, why the fuck are we supposed to listen to this guy's opinion?
> Polymarket’s own rating of the probability of a ceasefire before 31 March increased significantly in the past few days, from 6% on 21 March to 24% by Monday. More than $21m is currently being wagered on this outcome.
Again, this is just describing the normal and intended mechanics of the market. It's not anomalous and it's not evidence of wrongdoing.
Also it makes the $70k figure from the beginning look pretty small.
Publications must love they can now pump out an article every time someone creates a new account to place a large wager on a prediction market.
Having been a semi-pro sports bettor for a short stint as it went through legalization in the U.S., I’ve personally had tens of thousands wagered on sports teams I’ve never heard of before. Over the course of thousands of bets it becomes statistically inevitable that you have wagers placed right before major news (both for and against you).
It’s even entirely possible this individual has some or all their position hedged on another platform effectively capture a tiny arbitrage in the market.
There’s tons of upstart market makers on these prediction markets doing hundreds of thousands in volume a week as they provide liquidity, grinding out small edges in a way you’d never be able to know their true exposure to any one market across platforms.
It’s of course entirely possible this is an insider, but as a journalist you need something more than a large bet + good timing. Out of millions of wagers there will inevitably be plenty of random people who bet on a football game 5 minutes before the quarterback gets injured purely out of dumb luck.
Exactly. I suspect part of the issue here is that people without some exposure to this type of probabilistic thinking are SO BAD at reasoning about market actors and uncertainty.
"A ceasefire looks very unlikely, why they hell would anyone bet on that? That's very suspicious" is obviously a completely fucking idiotic statement to you and me ("why would you buy this ugly empty lot in Manhattan? There's no buildings on it!"). Maybe to a 25 year old Guardian journo with a history degree from Oxbridge it's just common sense.
Trump always announces ceasefires, negotiations and "deals" when the other party doesn't even know about it. Or, in the middle of real negotiations, he attacks.
This 5 day extension is to replenish US stocks and build up the marines in the region. while Israel continues to attack all the time.
The only deal that may have emerged in secret is for Iran not to hit the Dimona nuclear power plant and for Israel/US not to hit the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
Of course Trump's cronies will utilize the volatility and insider knowledge. The entire presidency is there to enrich his clan.
But surprisingly the market see this bullshit and savors it, they went up, after all..
Are they operating on hopes and prayers that Trump isn't lying "this time"? Or does everybody know it's all crap but if everyone else is buying, they don't want to miss the tide?
I would be interested to know who shorted oil in the hours before the purported negotiations post on Truth Social, and who then went long on it in shortly after the price readjusted and before the Iranians denied these negotiations.
Trump says something the other side will say is false in one hour. So make all the money before the other side responds and markets correct? What happens when Trump makes the wrong move? Will his family be in debt for eternity?
As soon as the news hit that the Iranians are claiming they have not negotiated anything while Trump is claiming the supposed negotiations are why he's not bombing Iranian power infrastructure really made wonder who Trump is trying to fool. It reminds me of Musk's tweet about securing financing to go private. Comments like this are meant to move a needle.
Wasn't there a flurry of market activity moments before Trump announced discussions between Iran and the USA, but such discussions never happened, or as Trump said, happened with someone he didn't want to name to protect them, which meant they were clearly not a decision maker in Iran - all of which was denied by Iran.
What if everything Trump does and says is merely to manipulate markets?
Trump is the ultimate mercurial. At the drop of a hat, he'll change his mind on things. Predicting Trump is a ridiculous proposition, and I'm willing to be most would agree with that.
Even Trump doesn't know what Trump will do next!
Yet meanwhile, there are people using "insider knowledge" to make decisions? What insider knowledge!! There is none. It's all made up on a day to day basis.
There's something funny about watching global markets react to Trump's every lazy lie as if Moses himself just passed down orders. Maybe funny is the wrong word. The kicker is that this isn't even Trump's war and he likely lacks the capacity to end it if he wanted to.
> and he likely lacks the capacity to end it if he wanted to.
Nah, he could end it any time he wants. Iran will stop bombing its neighbors in a week or so, and things will more or less return to the pre-war status quo.
He chooses to not end it, because the one thing that he cannot stand is losing face.
Iran will not stop harassing the region, and perhaps not even allow the strait to open, if Israel is still bombing them or fighting a proxy war in Lebanon. So Trump can pack up and head back to this side of the planet, having made our country a few trillion dollars poorer in the process, but the war doesn't ends until Iran and Israel decide it ends.
> Iran will not stop harassing the region, and perhaps not even allow the strait to open, if Israel is still bombing them or fighting a proxy war in Lebanon.
If Israel is still bombing them? Certainly.
This will put incredible international pressure on Israel to stop. It's one thing when the US wrecks the world's economy, and it's hard to push back on. It's an entirely different thing when a country of 10 million people is wrecking the world's economy. International opinion has been turning against it for years, already.
I do think it's very unlikely to continue the war if the bombing stopped, and only the proxy war continued.
People honestly forget that Iranians aren't stupid. Some of them are crazy, but not stupid. Iran has been doing things like saying you're safe in the Strait as long as you trade oil in Yuan, for example. They know exactly why they're doing that.
Now it's not very effective now, but if the US packs up and leaves they can keep doing it. "Trade in Yuan or we drone strike your ships" would lead to every company that operates there doing it provided it actually kept risk and insurance rates down.
There's no ceasefire, Iran has no idea what he is making up as always.
He's delaying until the Marines get there in a few days.
And until the markets close on Friday, notice how he said 5 days on Monday.
He's also bombed them the past two times in the middle of negotiations, why stop now
The man is a proven constant pathological liar since the day he came down the golden escalator 10 years ago, literally every time he speaks it's a lie.
Iran already knows his bluff. Abbas Aragchi even explicitly mentioned this in an interview, stating that negotiating with the US is a pointless exercise, but it tells the Iranians whether Dump is planning a major strike. So there's definitely going to be a major strike happening by Friday or Saturday.
To end the war, Iran will demand a full withdrawal of US forces from all neighboring countries as well as a shut down of US bases. This will also have the added benefit of giving them full control of the strait when the US leaves, and a free hand to bombard Israel. The GCC are already fatigued from a war they had no say in, so if the Iranians strike the desal plants, they will either join the US offensive or they'll kick the American troops out.
There are lists of the worst decisions of the Supreme Court in history (eg [1]). Dred Scott [2] often tops such lists. I believe that Trump v. United States [3] will go on such lists in the near future. Why? Because it opened the floodgates on corruption on a scale we previously haven't seen. The president has absolute immunity. The president's communications with the Attorney-General can't even be examined, basically. And there was absolutely no constitutional basis for it. The Court established a King.
So the president has absolute immunity from any consequences. The president can pardon anyone in their orbit. Pardons are now being openly sold for personal profit [4].
All of this was completely foreseeable from giving someone absolute immunity.
Prediction markets make this much worse because they're even more unregulated. We certainly had corruption even in Trump's first term (eg Jared Kushner's Saudi "investment" [5]). This is the new normal.
> So the president has absolute immunity from any consequences.
That's not true. Congress still has the power to impeach with the a conviction in the Senate removing the sitting president. The problem is that both chambers of Congress are lead by sycophants of the president. All SCOTUS did was put an asterisk to the notion that "no man above the law". It's a big fat asterisk to be sure, but they gave themselves a little wiggle room.
It's not a sign of insider trading that several people created accounts "around the time" Trump suggested winding down the war. It could have been after he publicly said that. This article is just made up crap fueling the FUD about government secrets being leaked by predictions markets.
Every single action taken under this administration has been either primarily for corrupt grifting or has been turned into that, to the benefit of the Trump family, their friends, and their donors. It’s ridiculous how open all of it is. And the people and companies benefiting from it are pretending like they’re not the bad guys.
If there are no paths to retroactively investigating and clawing back every last penny, this just leads to taxpayers giving up paying taxes eventually. What’s the point of a fundamentally corrupt system just for the rich and connected?
Highly skeptical of using a betting platform as an indication of insider knowledge and something to base your decisions off of. People will bet, and it's a 50/50 decision between "ceasfire yes / no". People vote with their gut.
Just because it's a binary choice doesn't make it a 50/50 chance. Flipping a fair coin (50/50) is different from flipping a weighted coin (say 80/20) even though the possible outcomes are the same.
It also warps reality to adhere to the prediction markets. There was a famous rash of objects being thrown onto WNBA courts recently that was spurred on by the potential for financial gain.
(2) Hedging your investments or exposure to an event by betting on it as insurance
(3) Insiders
(4) Information arbitrage (researchers, etc)
Three (3) and Four (4) are probably the most important for conveying useful information in pricing. I see it as a good, not bad thing, they are involved.
There could also be some degree of "(5) bandwagon effect" players, who pump money into an outcome specifically to get people talking about its possibility, thereby increasing its probability of coming into fruition.
If the administration decides to end this stupid war just so they can cash out some profitable bets... I don't even know what I would think. The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt.
I think the main reason is that they were all too incompetent to realize what the effects of the war would be on the global financial system. The bets were probably just a happy opportunity for corruption.
> The whole thing is so stupid it makes my head hurt
Look on the bright side, at least the malicious actors aren't able to competently implement their goals.
The economic effects impact the rest of the world much more than the US, which may have been somebody's planning point, although on the surface they seem to be too stupid to come up with this idea.
The US/North America is petroleum-product-independent-ish. We produce approximately as much hydrocarbons as we use. We also could produce a lot more but tar sands, shale oil, etc. are more expensive to produce and not very profitable at $60/bbl but it's there ready for the taking. When you're talking about how we aren't it's about how certain refineries are tuned for which type of oil and how we import unrefined and export the refined products, etc... but we're not RUNNING OUT of oil or energy.
Many places in the rest of the world aren't like that and will suffer much greater losses while the US is relatively strong. Of course we're all linked, but a power hungry dictator might only really care who's on top in a relative sense even if everybody is dragged down.
When do we cross the barrier from incompetent to nefarious?
They're orthogonal, so there's no barrier. They're all nefarious, and most are also incompetent.
Getting yourself installed as president while knowing you are incompetent (I mean, look at all those bankrupt businesses, he should know) is nefarious in itself. His entourage is nefarious for supporting the incompetency for their own gain.
One of the few conspiracy theories I kinda believe is that Trump's 2016 presidential run was a grift and he expected to lose.
Everything since has just been an inability to admit he was in over his head, plus trying to get out of trouble for all the crimes he did. He (and Clinton) just underestimated how susceptible the US was to a demagogue. If you look at his face after the win was announced on election night, and after the first meeting with Obama for the transition, I think it shows plainly on his face.
If people are giving you money, are you truly incompetent?
I think we're using different scales to measure competency.
If you're incompetent maybe you don't know you're incompetent? I think probably a lot of people told him, but he's also very stubborn, so. He's been rocking that god fucking awful spray tan for decades now.
I mean, Christ, we have good spray tans, I know we do.
And they are not nefarious and competent while pretending to be incompetent?
The Nazis were hilariously incompetent, but it didn't make them any less dangerous.
It's not an either-or question; they're very transparently both nefarious and incompetent.
So what does that say about their opposition who lost all three branches of government to them?
Populist evil polls better than technocratic evil.
Not nefarious enough?
it says that playing by the rules means losing work when the other party doesn't.
this is cyclical in america by design. see 2016 then 2018 than 2020 etc…
Probably January 6th 2021
You think polymarket is where this game is being played? For a couple hundred thousand dollars?
Since when do profoundly stupid people use this site?
Companies can buy a congressman for less than $10k in lobbying.
You live in a fantasy world if you believe the Trumps leave a penny on the table.
They are burning your country to the ground while enriching themselves.
> Since when do profoundly stupid people use this site?
Profoundly stupid people are the target demographics.
Rich folk would have a man gutted like a pig for a crisp $5 bill.
They would absolutely (have their secretary) commit legal inside trader for a few hundred thousand on every occasion they could.
Isn't the problem that they can't end the war unilaterally? The Iranian regime is justifiably pissed off and is still flinging drones and rockets towards any viable target, and any ceasefire will be with acceptance of their terms. The Trump/Netanyahu collection of dumb ego won't be able to accept being dictated terms.
So like in Game of Thrones, we hope a Jamie Lannister shows up...
This was my thought as well. Trump today claims he had long discussions with Iranian leadership over the weekend and Iran claims such a thing never happened.
Not only is Iran justifiably angry at its attackers, they have no reason to trust a ceasefire would be respected, and, furthermore, despite damage taken, stand to gain quite a lot if the war progresses as it has. Currently Iran is exporting more oil than ever before[0]. If the war continues as is they stand to emerge a much, much more dominant power on the world stage. Essentially being to BRICS what the GCC countries have been to the US (although much better defended).
Even the threats against their energy infrastructure can't really be backed up effectively. Iran has intentionally built its energy infrastructure to be highly distributed. Meanwhile Israel's infrastructure is highly centralized, with a small number of power plants providing massive proportions of the nations infrastructure. All this meaning that Iran can retaliate much more effectively the they can be harmed.
0. https://www.wsj.com/world/middle-east/irans-control-of-hormu...
The last few times Iran participated in talks and agreed on a ceasefire it worked against them.
Israel also bombed their negotiators last year.
In the enlightened POTUS' own words (yes, he wrote in all caps):
> I AM PLEASED TO REPORT THAT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, AND THE COUNTRY OF IRAN, HAVE HAD, OVER THE LAST TWO DAYS, VERY GOOD AND PRODUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS REGARDING A COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST. BASED ON THE TENOR AND TONE OF THESE IN DEPTH, DETAILED, AND CONSTRUCTIVE CONVERSATIONS, WHICH WILL CONTINUE THROUGHOUT THE WEEK, I HAVE INSTRUCTED THE DEPARTMENT OF WAR TO POSTPONE ANY AND ALL MILITARY STRIKES AGAINST IRANIAN POWER PLANTS AND ENERGY INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A FIVE DAY PERIOD, SUBJECT TO THE SUCCESS OF THE ONGOING MEETINGS AND DISCUSSIONS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1162782323629...
I think one way to understand Trump is that he is a compulsive and successful gaslighter. Behaviorally, he is a very interesting case for psychologists. He should be in future textbooks as a case study.
The bet amounts are small relative to the political scandal that would follow top administration officials who have decision making power.
If there is insider trading it's most likely low-level staffers or friends of officials who speak too freely.
If a high ranking official wanted to make a lot of money on these moves in an untraceable way, there are numerous financial market opportunities. The amount they could make on betting markets is peanuts and too easily tracked.
What scandal? They're openly corrupt and no consequences have followed so far.
Noem was removed from her position recently due to scandal. Weeks ago.
Noem was removed because she fell out of favour with Trump.
Yes, due to the $220 million advertising spend scandal and her claims about it.
Because she blamed it on Trump. Had she not blamed Trump, he would have likely protected her.
She should have been tied to a wooden post and shipped out of DC on an uncovered railcar for labelling a peaceful protester assassinated by ICE a "domestic terrorist".
Her scandal was not being subtle enough with the theft of government funds for Trump's taste, and he found a way to get rid of her that he could claim he had no part in.
I dont see the us empire recovering. This is in the starting / middle of a collapse. If any additional crises pop up inconjunction to this we are going to fall like the bronze age collapse
We've been through this already, someone placed a $30k bet (payout around $400k) that Maduro will leave office by the end of January hours before the US raid took place.
Have you noticed any meaningful scandals back then?
You are correct, and apparently they did. Probably no one will face any consequences unfortunately:
https://www.9news.com.au/world/donald-trump-iran-updates-oil...
Discussion on Reddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/1s1x5jq/minutes_b...
That would be darkly hilarious, but I think it could also be the opposite way around: That there is a ceasefire shaping up, and some of Trump's staffers couldn't hold it anymore and placed bets using their knowledge - therefore accidentally "leaking" the plans.
At least I'm having my hopes up for this.
Or further, the bets themselves could be an attempt at market manipulation.
The article isn’t implying that Trump is going to seek a ceasefire because of some puny bets on Polymarket, it’s implying that someone (or multiple people) close to Trump heard he was considering a ceasefire and placed a bet before Trump posted about it and the odds went up. Or they at least knew that him posting about it would affect the ours enough to make money, whether he plans to negotiate a ceasefire for real.
Are you really going to suggest trump cares about an $820k bet? He doesn't even care to collect his presidential salary.
I'm sure he exaggerates his wealth, but we know he's at least a billionaire.
He milks the government through other means such as crypto, llc’s, and overseas bribes “I mean deals”.
He's made billions in just crypto schemes. Then the bribes to pardon people. It just gles on and on. He never provided evidence that he didn't accept the salary, just said he donated it to federal agencies, which you cannot even do.
Sure you can:
https://www.pay.gov/public/search/global?formSearchCategory=...
Note that in addition to specific programs that accept donations, this list includes "Gifts to the U.S. Government" with no strings attached and "Gifts to Reduce the Public Debt".
It's not really up to the US and Israel when this war of choice ends anymore. It's up to Iran. And Iran, justifiably, is going to demand their pound of flesh. That could require some combination of ending the (criminal) sanctions, de-militarizing the Gulf and reining in Israel.
The problem is all of these things are politically untenable. This is the only reason why I think this war could continue long term because Trump simply cannot back down.
I think the recession from this could actually get so bad that there's now a nonzero (but still small) chance Trump gets removed from office, either by impeachment or by being 25A'ed.
It is hard to adequately state what a geopolitical disaster this was and it is I think quite easily the biggest mistake by an administration in the entire history of the US. I'm not exaggerating.
Still nowhere near as bad as the Vietnam war. Arguably not even as big a mistake as the CIA coup against Mossadegh, which is the poisoned tree from which the present situation grows.
I wonder how the coup in Cuba will turn out. That has to happen before the midterms, and he's unlikely to wait for Iran to resolve.
I think is a worse disaster than Vietnam. Why? Because the Vietnam War was localized. It was devastating to the people who got drafted and obviously devastating to the Vietnamese as well as the Cambodians that Nixon and Kissinger decidedly to relentless bomb for literally no reason. There was internal dissent but that was, saldy, quashed quite successfully.
The US simply doesn't have the military capability to invade Iran. It's surrounded by mountains so there's no land staging area like we had for Iraq in 1991. Am ambphibious landing would have to be on the scale of D-Day. Personnel-wise, the military is a lot smaller than it was in 1991 too.
This is why I laugh when people panic "they're going to invade" when 5000 Marines and 2-3 amphibious landing ships are moved to the Gulf. Those are so incredibly irrelevant and wholly insufficient for any kind of ground invasion that the worse they can do is be the Bay of Pigs 2.0.
The Iranian national project has been to resist American imperialism for the past almost 50 years. The military is distributed. Lots of it is under mountains or otherwise reinforced from air bombardment and missiles. Drones are incredibly cheap to produce and there's no viable path to stop the production and launch of ballistic missiles and drones.
That's how bad a decision this is. There is no viable military path to "victory" (whatever that means here). There is no way to invade, no way to hold the country militarily and no way to manufacture regime change.
Other countries in the region are way more vulnerable to loss of infrastructure (eg desalination plants). Iran has desalination plants too but it also gets a lot of drinking water from snowmelt. Many Americans are surprised by that. Iran has ski resorts. That's how mountainous it is.
Israel has been begging the US to topple Iran for 40+ years and every president has refused. Because it's completely unviable. Until this one.
There are really three wars being fought here and the objectives are different in every case. Israel wants to turn Iran into Somalia, which is to say a fail-state. The US wanted regime change. Iran simply wants to survive. And it will.
So this is why you see Israel escalate to drag the US into a war it doesn't really want. And if Israel succeeds and somehow the regime does topple it will create a massive refugee crisis that will likely topple the governments of most of Iran's neighbours. Israel is completely fine with that. The US isn't.
Every country in the Gulf had essentially been converted into a US client state other than Iran. We went so far as to put a former al-Qaeda lieutennant in charge of Syria. A likely consequence of this move is US influence in the region is going to massively decrease because the myth of the American security guarantee has been broken.
While the war is still poular with Trump's base we'll see how long that lasts when gas hits $8/gallon and food inflation hits 20%.
The Arab allies are going to be plenty pissed if US leaves without degrading Iran. They were doing fine before the US intervened, now they are worse of than they were before.
Head hurts to think how this will play out.
The Arab allies (aka client states) thought they had a lot more influence over America than they really do; it just happened that a lot of their asks aligned with Israel's asks. When push comes to shove and America has to choose between satisfying Israeli interests or the Arab states, not both at the same time, they're going to become disappointed. Both want Iran dealt with, but I think the tension will reach a breaking point over what the final result is meant to be. Israel would love for Iran to be a failed state like Somalia, as mentioned above, with a power vacuum they can fill and huge amounts of refugees streaming out and destabilizing their neighbors. The Arab states obviously don't want that, they want Iran stabilized with a compliant predictable government. There is approximately a zero percent chance of that happening, so they're going to be sorely disappointed.
One complication is that the sheiks are heavily invested in US tech companies and Kushner's ilk is heavily invested in the Middle East. So neither would want the other to crash and burn but can use the threat of financial pull out as a weapon.
I mean, Vietnam?
The amount of money to be made on these markets is in the tens of millions at best. This administration doesn’t care about that. I understand why you feel that way, the numbers are just too inconsequential to even move the needle.
Bit players with knowledge that have been perennially underpaid by the us govt. however, mortgage-saving money. I don’t blame them. Do you?
“I’m aware of a big decision and I can make 23k off of it, probably.” Do it up, congress has been living off insider trading for a century, let the little guy get theirs.
Until gambling commercials are banned in the same way cigarette commercials were banned, we’re all just yelling at the wind.
This is just one market. The other bets are all across the stock market.
Or in paying a part of the tariff bill for companies in exchange to an entitlement to the full refund if the tariffs were ruled unconstitutional.
The order of magnitude of “money to be made” is the same.
polymarket and kalshi are used as inputs to the rest of the market.
placing bets on polymarket is a cheap way to influence the whole market
> The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.
Ben Yorke is the only expert I see mentioned in the article, so it'd be a lot more accurate (and a lot less sensational) if The Guardian changed its title to "... says one expert" (but it wouldn't sound as interesting then, would it?).
> Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire. They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.
Not to sound privileged but $800k doesn't sound like that much of money for someone that has access to that kind of insider knowledge, especially considering the risks.
All things considered, I feel like the same people could make much bigger bets using trad-fi instruments than Polymarket so I don't understand what's so significant about Polymarket "whales".
In the end people just betting on TACO.
> $800k doesn't sound like that much of money for someone that has access to that kind of insider knowledge
I think you over-estimate by a large margin how much congressional staffers and/or Pentagon employees make, many of whom could have access to this kind of information in the course of their duties.
> especially considering the risks.
What risks?
1. This isn't insider trading of securities.
2. This administration is laughably corrupt.
You don’t have to be an insider to know that the US wants to broker a peace deal now that they’ve gotten themselves deep in the shit. Also, how could a Washington insider know if a peace deal will actually be brokered they have to negotiate with the other party after all.
Betting on a ceasefire isn't the interesting part, placing a five digit bet on a ceasefire by March 31st using brand-new accounts is.
Do you have any other plausible explanation for this behaviour? I can't think of any, if it's just like your average WallStreetBets gambler, why would they be making these bets from brand-new accounts?
Why wouldn't you constantly create new accounts for each bet? Isn't that like privacy/safety 101 for crypto?
Conspiracy theories are once again gossip for men. Interestingly, you can put your money where your mouth is in this case open your own account and make your own bets since you seem convinced. might as well cash in. Which gives me an idea … if only I had enough cash sitting around…
I'd rather set my money on fire than gamble, thank you very much.
Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this? Now me, as someone who doesn’t have access to insider knowledge, can know that there’s a noticeably increased chance of what’s going to happen. I do think maybe there should be some sort of feature to prevent last minute bets that utilizes insider knowledge, and I do admit there are considerable negative externalities to this system but it’s not clear to me that this is for sure bad.
This was one of the theoretical points of betting markets.
But there are two large concrete betting markets now. And they advertise not as a "world state discovery system" but as a gambling platform for people to try their luck on. They are also large businesses that are making their owners rich. Falling back on "oh we are just interested in the intellectual exercise of information discovery" is not tenable at this point.
The same logic can be used the opposite way, you can, with large amounts of money, manipulate events or people's responses to them.
* you can place large bets on events you have influence on the outcome for and make large amounts of money
* you can place large bets on events and then threaten people who have influence with a big stick
* you can place large bets expecting to lose money in order to change the outcome or a related outcome expecting people to look at the odds and change their behavior
And probably lots of other ways.
It corrupts events and on a world stage with unethical government in vogue... it's not impossible for people to manipulate a war in order to make bets go their way.
There was recently a story about a reporter who faced threats because their reporting contained a detail that while not significantly impactful (although about a literal impact) in it's own right changed the win conditions on a prediction bet.
I think prediction markets worked as an idea to provide a wisdom of the crowd view when they were being used in good faith, but rewards cause people to prioritise winning and gaming the system pays better than playing fairly.
There is no unfairly or fairly playing a prediction market. That's kind of the point. They don't work if you try to regulate them like they are a stock market or sports betting market. If you place money on one as a layman, you should consider yourself the dumb money. Lots of folks have convinced themselves they "know better" though, so it's a very easy psychological sell.
You either allow a free for all, or they should be simply outright banned. I mean, they should probably be banned either way - but without the prediction part this is not a single redeeming factor for them to exist.
The consequences for someone betting on classified information would need to come from the agency/government/etc. that finds out their staff is engaging in betting on privileged information. The market itself is simply taking bets and doing what it's designed to do. The bettor gets to decide if the risk is worth it.
Can we at least debate the obvious externality that an insider might skew their advice or actions to personally profit instead of doing whatever they think is most appropriate for their job?
That seems like a big one
Yeah I agree that there are big negative externalities and this is one. I’m more talking about is someone with insider knowledge but not the ability to influence - is that a bad thing specifically for these type of markets?
That phenomenon exists regardless. There may be some benefit to make it transparent.
All war is for profit anyway - on sufficiently long time scales, stopping war is the imperative.
> Isn’t one of the points of betting markets is to incentivize this?
No. It’s an unintended side effect that risks breaking trust in the system by (the majority of) players who don’t have insider knowledge.
Eh what? It’s literally the only reason for prediction markets to exist. Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
The only way you get more wisdom from “the crowd” is if it teases folks who hold non-public (or at least less public) information into the market to refine the odds towards what they should be.
Without insider information the entire concept is dead on arrival.
Yes randos are gonna gamble because they either don’t understand the game they are playing or are simple degenerate gamblers who want something else to gamble on. Others are going to think they know better or have limited insider information that isn’t worth as much as they think, or is not as accurate as they believe. And the delusional who simply think they know better for no logical reason but have convinced themselves otherwise.
> Otherwise they are simple gambling and pointless.
People find gambling fun. Owners of gambling services make a lot of money. The prediction markets both run ads that present themselves as gambling products.
Both of these things are points that can sustain large businesses.
> Otherwise they are simple gambling
maybe I'm dumb but I thought gambling is the whole point
Have you been to a casino?
Gambling is a billion dollar business.
That’s not true. Consider a jar of jellybeans.
That would go under someone who thinks they have more information than they think they do. Perhaps you are great at mathematics and think you can estimate much better than the average bidder. The person who filled the jar is going to have even better information than you do. Or perhaps not. Maybe they miscounted or their manager added a handful before they screwed the top of the jar on.
If the market that is taking the bet also filled the jar, then sure it’s just outright fraud at that point. But the market exists to get the real information into the open. Betting that an insider just isn’t going to play is a variable you consider when placing your bet imo.
the guy who put the jellybeans in the jar can put the best bet on the result, no?
A "market" is hypothesized to be "efficient" at price discovery.
An efficient "prediction market" would more quickly resolve to its expected outcome due to not only skin-in-the-game bets by experts, but also the influence of insiders.
Furthermore, bets are likely to shape outcomes. Betting someone will be assassinated (not allowed on Polymarket) would likely increase the probability of that outcome had there been no bet at all.
I’ve heard this assassination thing said, but I don’t see it. Someone still has to kill said person and somehow profit from the unlikelihood of this outcome. I’m not saying it’s impossible but I’m just saying that it’s never happened and maybe never will.
There is no assassination market to test it against.
If there was, I think you'd see quite a few public figures on the list.
And I think it _would_ cause folks to die. Which is why it's banned or regulated. (I'm actually not sure what the legal status is, just that Polymarket and US prediction markets disallow it.)
Polymarket is not fully in the US and its betting on oil prices is not a CTFC-allowed market. This is after all a bet on a commodity, which is already regulated and already a product available on ICE. Technically Polymarket doesn't need to care about the assassination market rule (which is a CFTC rule for prediction markets), but I presume they adhere to it out of respect for the reasoning behind the rule.
War is peace.
Ignorance is strength.
Openly corrupt markets that feature insiders with secret knowledge taking money from gambling addicts and rubes is actually good cause the crowd is now wiser.
Unironically yes. Someone bet a mid sized amount and now we all share in that potential insider knowledge. A small scale example is my spouse said that the election odds from her home country were not realistic because all the westerners were betting a candidate would win but weren’t accounting for corruption that she felt was guaranteed to happen. Turns out she was right.
Ah good. The NBA/NFL/MLB/etc should let players bet on whether they win or lose. Letting those with the influence on events being able to make money on them has never degraded a system before.
Someone must have just mistakenly put in regulations against insider trading before, for no good reason. Luckily this isn’t anything like the normal tech play of figuring out a loophole or flat out ignoring the law and hoping you get too big before the regulators catch up.
If athletes didn't face consequences for manipulating betting markets, I think you'd see people become less and less likely to bet on sports outcomes. People naturally don't like a rigged game, you don't have to tell them not to play it.
With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets? Because I'm not sure anyone you are moralizing at is taking up the argument that it's critical that they exist.
> With these betting markets, do you think it's critical that they exist, but with bans on insider bets?
No, I don’t think they should exist at all.
Sports betting is specifically not a prediction market precisely because the players are banned by both law and extreme consequences from their leagues for participating.
You cannot have an open-ended prediction market with the same protections. It's just impossible from a practical standpoint, much less theoretical one.
I don't think these should be legal since it's just enabling more random gambling, fraud, etc. or even worse for no clear societal gain. But if they do exist, the only purpose for them is to lure out insider information into the open. Pretending they are just folks gambling on 'random' outcomes like a fair coin flip is naive at best.
yarg, its a betting market that takes uncontrolled bets. I dont see how anyone that's not part of the grift economy can claim it's anything but.
Couldn't insiders just trade Brent Crude futures and do the same thing? There's more than enough liquidity in Brent that an insider can make great money.
A market with regulations, vs. no regulations.
Right so how are you going to find it and who is going to prosecute the insider trading here?
My point isn't that an unregulated prediction market (Polymarket non-US markets are non-CFTC certified) can obscure insider trading. My point is that Brent has enough liquidity that an insider can trade without moving markets. There's plenty of insiders that work on a contract basis and aren't required to disclose trades by STOCK Act provisions for public disclosure.
And honestly we aren't even out of the 45 day window around disclosures that would surface any Brent or WTI trades around the current Iran conflict anyway.
Also, isn't insider trading the whole point of prediction markets? They were originally conceptualized as information aggregators.
People tend to use the term insider incorrectly. Even in cftc regulated markets it is unlikely that an admin official is an insider.
What people are looking for is anti-corruption enforcement not market regulation. The problem isn’t that the admin is using advanced knowledge, all commodities trading involves that, it’s that the officials have an obligation to the public as part of their governmental service.
Of course this admin _also_ gutted the anti-corruption offices in the government along with the market regulators.
If they were then that memo got lost when it reached the general populace that sees them as a gambling vehicle. I think it'd be extremely reasonable if people with qualified access to information like this were banned from leveraging it on prediction markets.
If someone has news they want to get out they can just use the media.
Brent isn't security products so not covered under anti insider trading law right?
STOCK Act should cover commodities futures, so Brent and WTI should be covered.
They did just that if we are to believe random reddit posts.
That more-or-less happened over the weekend [0]. Five minutes before Trump's unsurprising TACO announcement an unexpected large number of WTI futures contracts were sold and an even larger amount of S&P 500 futures were purchased.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/03/23/volume-in-stock-and-oil-...
Yes that's my point. There's this whole new angle of prurient news where articles try to use the "anynomous nature" of Polymarket to play into an a corruption story as if it's all some new, dangerous game.
But why? You can trade Brent or WTI and do the same exact thing with much less scrutiny. $800k of Brent futures is nothing, and instead of having to risk your entire bet going bust like in prediction markets and their binary outcomes you can just take a loss on your investment instead if you time your exit incorrectly.
Not familiar with Brent Crude futures, is it possible to trade them anonymously the way you can on Polymarket?
Look, no offense here, but if you're this unaware of how oil markets work, and it seems like markets in general work, I suggest doing at least some initial googling before digesting this story.
I realize for some the whole appeal of this kind of story is "look Trump bad" and then to get into the comments about how bad he is to play political sportsball, but insider trading is sadly a bipartisan phenomenon. No question though that this admin is the most brazen about its corruption in my lifetime though.
My understanding is that an individual works through a brokerage to buy/sell securities on an exchange. The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading. In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.
What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).
I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out. I was hoping an expert would be able to enlighten us, so we can share informed opinions rather than uninformed opinions.
> In contrast, the fact that polymarket is crypo-based makes it a lot easier for people to be fully anonymous.
Remember that even if you make USDC on Polymarket, at some point you need to turn that into spendable fiat. Even if you move USDC over to Coinbase, if you move over $800k+, there is no way your new gains will not be met with scrutiny. Once you have that much USDC and no good explanation on how you made it you essentially need to launder the money. There's low hanging fruit to spend crypto on like VPNs and compute, but there's very few ways to launder that much money easily and most importantly cheaply.
> What I'm not sure of is whether disclosure regulations would apply to all government officials who could plausibly have insider knowledge (probably not?), whether oil futures would be covered by those regulations (probably?), whether it's possible to be fully anonymous to the brokerage (probably not?), and how much access law enforcement has to information regarding who is making what trades (not much without a court orders?).
Yeah if you search around you'll find that this is covered by the STOCK Act [1]. Pretty simple, cursory search.
> The brokerage knows who they are acting on behalf of, but not who is on the other side of the transaction. The public doesn't automatically know, except for government officials who are obligated to disclose their trading.
Borkerages don't build knowledge graphs of their users and the things these users can and cannot trade even if they know who they are. If you've ever held RSUs, there are companies that put trading restrictions on your RSUs but this is a brokerage platform concept, and isn't even universal across brokerages. For the most part brokerages don't care what you make money on. This only becomes a problem if the SEC chooses enforcement action.
One of the simplest ways that insiders come under scrutiny is taking large positions that make the news or move markets (or otherwise soak up lots of liquidity.) Oil is traded in futures, which means each contract is for 1000 barrels. CBK26 right now is priced at $103.73, which means a single contract is worth $103,730. A position of $800k is a pretty standard amount in Brent (though this is a future, so you'll need to post margin which makes this more expensive.) From there it's a game of how likely it is to be caught trading and then prosecuted. If you tell nobody and come under no scrutiny you're golden; sell your position when the time comes and make $$$. Plenty of government positions, like contractors, are not required to disclose under the STOCK Act and so there's almost no likelihood those insiders will come under any scrutiny.
And unlike a Polymarket bet you don't end up making the news when you trade $800k of contracts nor will you run the risk of mistiming your bet and losing your entire bet and then go through the headache of laundering your money out.
> I don't think that is a trivial amount of research to do, and I would guess the vast majority of people viewing this thread don't know the answers and will not try to find them out.
No offense but this is a low bar to have. It's all a few web searches away. I'm pretty sure you can get an LLM to teach you this in a few turns of conversation. What is the "appropriate" amount of knowledge we should expect an internet commenter to have? I mean posting on HN has to mean something right? Or maybe those days are gone on here.
[1]: https://www.congress.gov/bill/112th-congress/senate-bill/203...
what's the point of your comment? it's a thread... on a forum of non experts... and he asked a question.
Lots of lucky trades timed just prior to and in aftermath of latest Trump social media announcement. It could be coincidence or not.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/03/23/volume-in-stock-and-oil-futu...
Yeah this is exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about.
> “For the purposes of this market, an ‘official ceasefire agreement’ requires clear public confirmation from both the United States government and the government of Iran that they have agreed to halt military hostilities against one another.” (by March 31)
Seems a rather risky bet considering how deep Israel has ventured into its war in Lebanon. Very doubtful they will stop anytime soon. Given the leverage Israel has demonstrated over US foreign policy I find it hard to imagine that the US will 'leave them to it'. Likewise, Iran is unlikely to leave Hezbollah's interests out of any negotiations or for that matter to trust that the US isn't asking for negotiations in bad faith. I guess there could be a limited ceasefire agreed between Iran and the US to make room for negotiations but the ceasefire would almost certainly have to occur without the opening of the strait or an end to fighting in Lebanon. This (now regional) war has a long way to go in my opinion.
Ultimately, I think this all hinges on whether or not the Iranians feel that they have enough leverage to exercise yet. My feeling is that they will want to continue to the point of destroying Trump's political career - something they could possibly do if this quagmire continues to get worse and closer to the US midterms. Bringing down a US president is potentially one way they can help ensure that they don't simply get attacked again in the near future.
There was an interesting article in a local paper here about non zionist Jews emigrating from Israel.
There are no missiles and draft in Western Europe and the shops are open on every holy day.
Unfortunately this leaves the holy land to the fanatics.
Zion for Zionists is always what they have wanted. Originally, it was supposed to be Ashkenazi Jews only.
Non-zionist Jews have been leaving Israel whenever the opportunity rose. This war was just an accelerant for further emigration.
The only ones who choose to stay back are folks fresh into Aliyah, who might've received a lot of incentives from the government to settle in the illegal West Bank settlements. Or those who really believe in Zionism. The former are typically guys who couldn't make the cut even in their home countries, so they're certainly not adequate replacements for the ones leaving.
Not to mention, it's mostly the liberal cities like Tel Aviv which have faced the brunt of Iranian barrages. Jerusalem has been barely hit. Folks staying in those cities, working actual jobs contributing to the economy and not Torah studies, are likely the ones leaving - I know many of my acquaintances who've left Tel Aviv for the US or Dubai.
I can't see it being over in a week. People seem to have not realized that the Iranian regime is large enough and possessed of enough of a sense of honor to not just surrender after a week. Plus the use of decapitation attacks makes it extremely difficult for the Iranians to talk each other down. And the US can't negotiate on behalf of Israel or bind them to not break the ceasefire, because there's a separate and much longer lasting conflict between Israel and Iran that has been going on since the revolution.
On the other hand, there is no way to "destroy Trump's career". The US system doesn't have confidence votes. You're stuck with him.
Edit: it is an unfortunate aspect of the minor World War that the Iran war has overshadowed the war in Lebanon, whatever is happening in Syria, and the weird UAE backed war in Sudan.
> On the other hand, there is no way to "destroy Trump's career". The US system doesn't have confidence votes. You're stuck with him.
If they lose the senate, then impeachment becomes possible, no?
> ... I think this all hinges on whether or not the Iranians feel that they have enough leverage to exercise yet.
They don't have a navy anymore and they don't have fighter planes anymore. There's only so many missiles they can launch out without revealing where they're launched from. That leaves them with drones: are iranian drones really sufficient to have any leverage?
Why "yet"? As time goes on they've got less and less leverage: they're getting bombed daily. It's not as if they were producing military material faster than it's getting destroyed.
At this point the islamists in Iran (who doesn't represent all iranian people) are menacing of some kind of scorched earth strategy: where they're saying "if you don't stop destroying every military capacity we have and if you begin to moreover attack our non-military infrastructure, we'll prevent other countries in the region from... Having access to water".
I mean: it could be some leverage, but it reeks of desperation to me. They're getting their arses handed to them in this war. "We'll send drones on oil tankers" and "We'll make sure our neighbors, which we already bombed for no reason, now die of thirst" doesn't sound like a genius war strategy to me. Just like hanging iranian athletes publicly doesn't exactly inspire sympathy from the rest of the world and doesn't sound like a sound strategy either: it's obviously to "make a statement" against all the iranians who wish to see the islamists gone and a regime change, but it's not a genius strategy to gain allies among other countries.
As to Trump's political career: he's old, he cannot be president three times. He's already done 5 years and 2 months of his 8 years, that's 2/3 of his 8 years. He's seems to give absolutely zero fuck about anything since a bullet missed him: he's got 2 years and 10 months left as president and I don't see him quitting. Maybe he'll die of old age but I don't see him quitting.
As a sidenote I think we can all agree that senile-autopen-Biden wasn't exactly fit to rule the country either and yet he stayed until the end of his term, barely able to walk or to look at the correct camera. I mean: so far only one president of the US ever resigned. What are the odds that Trump would be the second one? I don't buy it.
And losing the midterms isn't "bringing down a US president": it doesn't mean a new president gets to get elected.
> They don't have a navy anymore
I get where you're coming from in a lot of ways, but the strait (edited) remains closed, and it's not just a perception issue. From this article [0]:
> U.S. officials have previously declared the Iranian Navy to have been rendered combat ineffective, but many of the more than 120 ships it has targeted so far have been larger vessels. Iran has hundreds of fast boats, some of which are armed with short-range anti-ship missiles, as well as artillery rockets and other weapons. They can also be used to lay naval mines. These fleets are inherently harder to find and fix, and do not need large ports to operate from.
Maybe that's why very few ships are still getting through. The rest of the article is a fun read about how A-10s are taking out those small boats, but there's still a whole lot of work left to do. I think Iran still has a lot of asymmetric juice left, and at some point the law of diminishing returns will kick in.
On the other hand it was a war of choice and the U.S. can make their declaration of victory look like whatever they want it to.
[0] https://www.twz.com/air/a-10-warthogs-are-prowling-for-irani...
As Sun Tzu wrote in the Art of War (a much shittier book than Art of the Deal /s), always give your enemy a way out. Otherwise they will fight to their death...
And the Taliban were defeated in Afghanistan too...
Some of the stuff you read on HN...
Their drones are cheap easy to conceal, and can keep the straight closed indefinitely. And what other leverage do they have besides them keeping the straight closed?
> And what other leverage do they have besides them keeping the straight closed?
They also have the potential for Houthi involvement - threatening shipping in the Red Sea. In addition the Houthis or Iran themselves are more than capable of disabling Saudi Arabia's Red Sea port - shutting off a major relief valve for gulf oil exports.
In short, Iran has plenty of further escalation options (i.e. leverage). Not to mention the ongoing threat they present to Israel which I believe they are more than capable of increasing. If you doubt that, I would suggest searching for some of Ted Postol's commentary regarding Iran's missile attacks and Israel and the US's ability to defend against them. He is very dubious that they can and that the 80-90% intercept rates are in fact baloney. He does have prior form here - being essentially the only one to question patriot missile effectiveness vs scuds in the Iraq war. He claimed a full order of magnitude less effectiveness than reported (9% I believe) and was proven right.
What signs? This article is absolute slop (not AI, but slop).
I do not have any reason to doubt that people are doing insider trading. The US admin is obviously corrupt and the Iran attacks are the most abject symptom of its corruption so far.
But you can't just put out a bunch of completely isolated observations with zero analysis and say "that looks like insider trading". There is nothing at all in here that presents an argument for that claim.
I am a daily Guardian reader but I stopped paying for it coz there are so many articles like this that are just complete fucking trash. Because I am the target audience (leftist Euro who can easily get riled up by topics like this) it pisses me off when I feel I'm being manipulated.
I think it would be fun to discover that there is inside trading going on here, but it's coming from Iranians.
I appreciate your perspective on this. We're living in an era of sensationalism and noise. It wont get better until a lot of people from every political disposition becomes tired of hollow words designed only to create BIG FEELINGS.
Imagine an era where the majority leans in on a balance of compassion for self and others.
Breakdown of the presented points:
> Eight accounts, all newly created around 21 March, bet a total of nearly $70,000 (£52,000) on there being a ceasefire.
Is that anomalous? Are these numbers large in context?
> They stand to make nearly $820,000 if such a deal is reached before 31 March.
Yes that is indeed how prediction markets work for unlikely events?
> An account that made the same bet was created shortly before the US struck Iran on 28 February. It also placed a winning bet on those strikes, which raised similar questions around insider trading, and so far has bet on nothing else.
Is that anomalous? If I was betting 5 figure sums I would also stick to my areas of expertise. That doesn't mean I'm an insider.
> The new accounts all appear to have been created late last week, around the time when the US president, Donald Trump, appeared to first double down on war with Iran, then suggest in an after-markets Truth Social post that he was considering “winding down” military operations.
So what??? Is anything about that anomalous? What is that supposed to tell us about the accounts?
> The wallets “definitely [look like] someone with some degree of inside info”, said Ben Yorke, formerly a researcher with CoinTelegraph, now building an AI trading platform called Starchild.
"Some random fucking guy said this thing", OK?
> But online crypto watchers and experts suggested that the bets bore the signs of insider trading – both because they bought their positions at market price,
What the fuck does that even mean?
> and because some of the accounts looked like they could belong to a single investor attempting to conceal their identity by splitting their bet between multiple wallets.
This is just repeating a former claim that was not backed up with any rationale. And note the very next sentence provides an alternative motive for traders to split wallets, aside from insider trading.
> “Typically, when you see wallet-splitting and deliberate attempts to obfuscate identity, it’s one of two scenarios: either a very large investor trying to shield their position from market impact, or insider trading,” said Yorke.
But we haven't been presented with any evidence that we're seeing either of those things?? And also I can't help repeating, why the fuck are we supposed to listen to this guy's opinion?
> Polymarket’s own rating of the probability of a ceasefire before 31 March increased significantly in the past few days, from 6% on 21 March to 24% by Monday. More than $21m is currently being wagered on this outcome.
Again, this is just describing the normal and intended mechanics of the market. It's not anomalous and it's not evidence of wrongdoing.
Also it makes the $70k figure from the beginning look pretty small.
Publications must love they can now pump out an article every time someone creates a new account to place a large wager on a prediction market.
Having been a semi-pro sports bettor for a short stint as it went through legalization in the U.S., I’ve personally had tens of thousands wagered on sports teams I’ve never heard of before. Over the course of thousands of bets it becomes statistically inevitable that you have wagers placed right before major news (both for and against you).
It’s even entirely possible this individual has some or all their position hedged on another platform effectively capture a tiny arbitrage in the market.
There’s tons of upstart market makers on these prediction markets doing hundreds of thousands in volume a week as they provide liquidity, grinding out small edges in a way you’d never be able to know their true exposure to any one market across platforms.
It’s of course entirely possible this is an insider, but as a journalist you need something more than a large bet + good timing. Out of millions of wagers there will inevitably be plenty of random people who bet on a football game 5 minutes before the quarterback gets injured purely out of dumb luck.
Exactly. I suspect part of the issue here is that people without some exposure to this type of probabilistic thinking are SO BAD at reasoning about market actors and uncertainty.
"A ceasefire looks very unlikely, why they hell would anyone bet on that? That's very suspicious" is obviously a completely fucking idiotic statement to you and me ("why would you buy this ugly empty lot in Manhattan? There's no buildings on it!"). Maybe to a 25 year old Guardian journo with a history degree from Oxbridge it's just common sense.
It’s likely a misdirection, it’s hard to say what might happen. It might not even be five days wait.
Trump always announces ceasefires, negotiations and "deals" when the other party doesn't even know about it. Or, in the middle of real negotiations, he attacks.
This 5 day extension is to replenish US stocks and build up the marines in the region. while Israel continues to attack all the time.
The only deal that may have emerged in secret is for Iran not to hit the Dimona nuclear power plant and for Israel/US not to hit the Bushehr nuclear power plant.
Of course Trump's cronies will utilize the volatility and insider knowledge. The entire presidency is there to enrich his clan.
He also does everything Friday after market close.
As an Australian the next dumbest thing I've ever heard of reliably happens mid Saturday as a result.
The "5 day extension" is coincidentally exactly that timeframe.
But surprisingly the market see this bullshit and savors it, they went up, after all..
Are they operating on hopes and prayers that Trump isn't lying "this time"? Or does everybody know it's all crap but if everyone else is buying, they don't want to miss the tide?
Ceasefire alone? Seems like there was insider knowledge even on start of war bidding.
Given the pause in hostilities announced today it certainly looks like insider knowledge: https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/1162782323629...
I would be interested to know who shorted oil in the hours before the purported negotiations post on Truth Social, and who then went long on it in shortly after the price readjusted and before the Iranians denied these negotiations.
Trump says something the other side will say is false in one hour. So make all the money before the other side responds and markets correct? What happens when Trump makes the wrong move? Will his family be in debt for eternity?
When the entire US administration is compromised by Russia, why wouldn't they want to milk it.
For most people, that's a plus of course.
As soon as the news hit that the Iranians are claiming they have not negotiated anything while Trump is claiming the supposed negotiations are why he's not bombing Iranian power infrastructure really made wonder who Trump is trying to fool. It reminds me of Musk's tweet about securing financing to go private. Comments like this are meant to move a needle.
Wasn't there a flurry of market activity moments before Trump announced discussions between Iran and the USA, but such discussions never happened, or as Trump said, happened with someone he didn't want to name to protect them, which meant they were clearly not a decision maker in Iran - all of which was denied by Iran.
What if everything Trump does and says is merely to manipulate markets?
It's pretty clear, the US only carries out war on weekends, while markets sleep.
This is very weird.
Trump is the ultimate mercurial. At the drop of a hat, he'll change his mind on things. Predicting Trump is a ridiculous proposition, and I'm willing to be most would agree with that.
Even Trump doesn't know what Trump will do next!
Yet meanwhile, there are people using "insider knowledge" to make decisions? What insider knowledge!! There is none. It's all made up on a day to day basis.
There's something funny about watching global markets react to Trump's every lazy lie as if Moses himself just passed down orders. Maybe funny is the wrong word. The kicker is that this isn't even Trump's war and he likely lacks the capacity to end it if he wanted to.
People want to believe this war will end soon.
> The kicker is that this isn't even Trump's war
That's quite possible.
> and he likely lacks the capacity to end it if he wanted to.
Nah, he could end it any time he wants. Iran will stop bombing its neighbors in a week or so, and things will more or less return to the pre-war status quo.
He chooses to not end it, because the one thing that he cannot stand is losing face.
Iran will not stop harassing the region, and perhaps not even allow the strait to open, if Israel is still bombing them or fighting a proxy war in Lebanon. So Trump can pack up and head back to this side of the planet, having made our country a few trillion dollars poorer in the process, but the war doesn't ends until Iran and Israel decide it ends.
> Iran will not stop harassing the region, and perhaps not even allow the strait to open, if Israel is still bombing them or fighting a proxy war in Lebanon.
If Israel is still bombing them? Certainly.
This will put incredible international pressure on Israel to stop. It's one thing when the US wrecks the world's economy, and it's hard to push back on. It's an entirely different thing when a country of 10 million people is wrecking the world's economy. International opinion has been turning against it for years, already.
I do think it's very unlikely to continue the war if the bombing stopped, and only the proxy war continued.
Israel is basically immune to pressure from countries other than the US, and the US won't pressure them because of domestic politics.
People honestly forget that Iranians aren't stupid. Some of them are crazy, but not stupid. Iran has been doing things like saying you're safe in the Strait as long as you trade oil in Yuan, for example. They know exactly why they're doing that.
Now it's not very effective now, but if the US packs up and leaves they can keep doing it. "Trade in Yuan or we drone strike your ships" would lead to every company that operates there doing it provided it actually kept risk and insurance rates down.
There's no ceasefire, Iran has no idea what he is making up as always.
He's delaying until the Marines get there in a few days.
And until the markets close on Friday, notice how he said 5 days on Monday.
He's also bombed them the past two times in the middle of negotiations, why stop now
The man is a proven constant pathological liar since the day he came down the golden escalator 10 years ago, literally every time he speaks it's a lie.
Iran already knows his bluff. Abbas Aragchi even explicitly mentioned this in an interview, stating that negotiating with the US is a pointless exercise, but it tells the Iranians whether Dump is planning a major strike. So there's definitely going to be a major strike happening by Friday or Saturday.
To end the war, Iran will demand a full withdrawal of US forces from all neighboring countries as well as a shut down of US bases. This will also have the added benefit of giving them full control of the strait when the US leaves, and a free hand to bombard Israel. The GCC are already fatigued from a war they had no say in, so if the Iranians strike the desal plants, they will either join the US offensive or they'll kick the American troops out.
There are lists of the worst decisions of the Supreme Court in history (eg [1]). Dred Scott [2] often tops such lists. I believe that Trump v. United States [3] will go on such lists in the near future. Why? Because it opened the floodgates on corruption on a scale we previously haven't seen. The president has absolute immunity. The president's communications with the Attorney-General can't even be examined, basically. And there was absolutely no constitutional basis for it. The Court established a King.
So the president has absolute immunity from any consequences. The president can pardon anyone in their orbit. Pardons are now being openly sold for personal profit [4].
All of this was completely foreseeable from giving someone absolute immunity.
Prediction markets make this much worse because they're even more unregulated. We certainly had corruption even in Trump's first term (eg Jared Kushner's Saudi "investment" [5]). This is the new normal.
[1]: https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/supreme-court/13-worst-su...
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dred_Scott_v._Sandford
[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_v._United_States
[4]: https://www.cato.org/blog/embarrassment-riches
[5]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-68296877
> So the president has absolute immunity from any consequences.
That's not true. Congress still has the power to impeach with the a conviction in the Senate removing the sitting president. The problem is that both chambers of Congress are lead by sycophants of the president. All SCOTUS did was put an asterisk to the notion that "no man above the law". It's a big fat asterisk to be sure, but they gave themselves a little wiggle room.
Republicans spent about 40 years stacking the court with partisans in order to overturn Roe v Wade, and got the corruption as a bonus.
It's not a sign of insider trading that several people created accounts "around the time" Trump suggested winding down the war. It could have been after he publicly said that. This article is just made up crap fueling the FUD about government secrets being leaked by predictions markets.
Every single action taken under this administration has been either primarily for corrupt grifting or has been turned into that, to the benefit of the Trump family, their friends, and their donors. It’s ridiculous how open all of it is. And the people and companies benefiting from it are pretending like they’re not the bad guys.
In our current system, the only defenses against corruption:
- Standards and norms, which obviously the current administration doesn't give a rat's ass about
- Failing that, Congress has to step in and impeach and convict. This won't happen because the Republicans have completely rolled over
So, here we are.
If there are no paths to retroactively investigating and clawing back every last penny, this just leads to taxpayers giving up paying taxes eventually. What’s the point of a fundamentally corrupt system just for the rich and connected?
Highly skeptical of using a betting platform as an indication of insider knowledge and something to base your decisions off of. People will bet, and it's a 50/50 decision between "ceasfire yes / no". People vote with their gut.
Just because it's a binary choice doesn't make it a 50/50 chance. Flipping a fair coin (50/50) is different from flipping a weighted coin (say 80/20) even though the possible outcomes are the same.
No, but I'm just saying, people vote based on feels.
Insiders don‘t and you’re ignoring the reasons why insider trading is suspected.
It’s not because they bet, because how and when they bet
Yes, and they consistently lose money to insiders who vote based on actual knowledge.
I would be too - if we didn't have prior evidence of massive insider trading on prediction markets.
Insider trading makes prediction markets more accurate, not less.
It also warps reality to adhere to the prediction markets. There was a famous rash of objects being thrown onto WNBA courts recently that was spurred on by the potential for financial gain.
A few major actors in predictions markets
(1) Recreational or addicted gamblers
(2) Hedging your investments or exposure to an event by betting on it as insurance
(3) Insiders
(4) Information arbitrage (researchers, etc)
Three (3) and Four (4) are probably the most important for conveying useful information in pricing. I see it as a good, not bad thing, they are involved.
There could also be some degree of "(5) bandwagon effect" players, who pump money into an outcome specifically to get people talking about its possibility, thereby increasing its probability of coming into fruition.
mh. Guess my view of betting is too naive. I wouldn't have expected anything beyond (1).
With my usual addictive behaviour, I think it's prob best I stay away from that though.. :)
(1) provides an incentive for the rest to participate.
Can anyone point to any instance of anyone benefitting from the information conveyed in these prediction markets?
There's an entire academic field called statistics you seem to be forgetting all about.