Strange things are happening in the markets. Last Monday, 15 minutes before Donald Trump announced that “productive talks” had taken place with Iran, oil traders placed half a billion dollars worth of bets on the future price of oil. Trump’s statement sent crude prices tumbling, and it seems some people knew the announcement was coming. So it became a winning bet.
Don't be jealous. Some people are just born luckier than others.
We don't know if the trades were made with knowledge of the political developments, but it's an incredible coincidence. It all seems "unusually certain," an oil analyst told the BBC.
The suspiciously timed trades, if indeed made on insider information, would be part of a broader betting boom that turns political outcomes into opportunities that generate windfall profits. Take Polymarket, for example, an online prediction market that took off in the early 2020s and lets you bet on everything from the outcome of the Super Bowl to whether Trump is going to invade another country.
Before the US attack on Iran, several new accounts on the platform predicted the timing of US-Israeli attacks 24 hours before they occurred. The same pattern was detected after the US coup in Venezuela in January.
A single account, created just days before the military action began , earned more than $400.000. As a result of these transactions, there are people who ask whether it is possible that the president of the United States or his associates are illegally benefiting from political power, while also finding that this question is almost impossible to answer.
The White House denies that the Trump family has engaged in any such activity.
Betting markets are growing in popularity precisely because their activity has few barriers to entry and is difficult to track. Bets are made in cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and thus have fewer traditional, traceable banking footprints or restrictions. The platforms are decentralized, open to global users, and very difficult to regulate and shut down internationally by a single jurisdiction. Financial markets have always created and traded speculative instruments based on the prediction of an asset’s price movements, but betting markets turn the future itself into an asset on which you can bet on an almost limitless number of scenarios, even how missiles will be intercepted.
It wouldn’t be a stretch to speculate whether some of these suspicious bets came directly from a shamelessly self-enriching Trump administration. Since Trump took office, his family has launched several cryptocurrency businesses. A New York Times investigation earlier this year found that Trump made at least $1,5 billion in the first year of his second term.
This does not imply that Trump is informing the people around him, but it does not seem to be inconsistent with the ethics he has demonstrated so far.
There are other possibilities. He is a naive showman surrounded by a large group of private and professional employees. It is not inconceivable that people are simply walking around and collecting the information he reveals, and then passing it on.
But there is a broader cultural shift, one that is taking hold in the White House and spreading to betting platforms. A shift based on making money from everything possible, from the presidency to your online presence, and turning audiences into indicators.
There’s also the promise that anyone can be as successful as the scammers who are responsible, which of course came from clever, creative, and downright clever deals. It’s an entire industry. Influencers in the androsphere (watch the documentary on Netflix) are selling dubious investment platforms, with the implicit suggestion that this is the way to unlock luxurious ways. They sell that they are the winners of society, they have a formula, a secret recipe, an insider advantage, and that you need one too.
They promise that you can live a decent life with a mortgage, some savings, job security, and a decent pension. Along with that, there is the cultural devaluation of working for someone else, and the glorification of being your own boss. Optimize your money, do a little side job speculating on the betting markets, get a passive income stream, even the US president has one!
Then there's the kind of unreality Trump is marketing to the world. Treating everything as entertainment and spectacle has made politics another sport. He's both a moody clown and the all-powerful leader of a global circus where every day is a surprise: will it be peaceful or will people die? Place your bets.
But US policy has always been incredibly lax when it comes to regulating the financial interests of those in power.
Members of Congress are allowed to buy and sell individual stocks, while also being aware of all sorts of discussions and regulations regarding publicly traded industries.
Nancy Pelosi has amassed a fortune during her tenure, to the point where a “Pelosi tracker” was created to track her trades and mimic them to replicate the extraordinary gains she has made. The right to make money extends beyond office. Hillary and Bill Clinton turned decades of public service into a money-making machine, earning hundreds of millions of dollars from speaking engagements and consulting, amassing more money than they will ever need.
The question hanging over much of Trump's second term is whether he represents an acceleration of a dynamic that went before or an entirely new kind of politician.
The answer could be both, depending on the scenario. By openly aggrandizing his and his family’s wealth, he has violated rules that consider some kind of enrichment from political office acceptable, but not the brazen transformation of the White House into a private enterprise. In the way he has used office to sell the Trump brand, he has dismantled political decency, but has compounded and accelerated a broader culture of ruthless greed.
We may never know if these suspicious market transactions are directly linked to Trump, but we do know that he is very well-adapted to the current environment – a deregulated, greedy, profit-driven political culture that is being transformed into a grand, global enrichment scheme.
Although the press releases will range from very select to rare, I said I'd pass...because sometimes the editors hide.
