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Politics : Did the Great Experiment Fail? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: DMaA who wrote (450)	3/11/2013 9:55:29 PM
From: Tom Clarke	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 926

No one will be able to wager on Intrade's climate markets anymore Intrade, R.I.P. ‘The last, best hope for pundit accountability’ Mark J. Perry \| March 11, 2013, 4:48 pm From the Intrade website: “With sincere regret we must inform you that due to circumstances recently discovered we must immediately cease trading activity on www.intrade.com.” From today’s Washington Post Wonk Blog: Intrade is dead. And we come to mourn it. It was, of course, the Ireland-based betting market that was most famous for letting people wager on news events—the outcome of the presidential race most prominently, but also any number of geopolitical events, like whether Greece might leave the euro or Israel attack Iran. The latest Intrade odds on various political outcomes, before the site shut down over the weekend. For Americans, the Ireland-based trading platform always existed on tenuous legal ground. It was part online gambling site and part unregulated futures market, neither of which are legal in the United States. That’s why in November, after the Commodities Futures Trading Commission sued, Intrade closed all U.S. accounts. It is unclear what led to its shutting down over the weekend, except that its board of directors said there “may be financial irregularities.” It’s a shame, and this is why. We live in a world of punditry in which there are large amounts of, to put it nicely, horse manure. Those of us who write and talk about what will happen inevitably rely on vague predictions, full of qualifications. I’m guilty of it myself, and often find myself writing things like “this ought to be an OK year for the economy, if fiscal austerity isn’t too severe and there isn’t a return of the European crisis.” On Intrade, by contrast, the traders who participate and collectively set market prices, are forced to choose—and put money where their mouths are. Will the United States enter a recession in 2013? Before it shut down, the prices for that contract on Intrade implied a 16.9 percent chance that the answer was “yes.” In a world in which people hold their pundits to a higher standard, people spouting off on the economy (or politics, or foreign affairs, or the selection of the pope) would be forced to make specific, testable predictions, and attach probabilities to those guesses. aei-ideas.org