The story on CBSMarketwatch is about our elected reps being very upset about this. Terrorism represents loss of innocent life to us. So making money from the sufferings of others is a bit hard to take. I can see how there might be a reasonable use to hedge with these contracts though. Not many of us are too overwhelmingly affected by the fluctuations in commodity prices. Industrial users are however. Except for the loss of life thing, which is very important, traders in general profit from some sort of demise every day. So many people have had to postpone retirement etc. because of the market declines.... yet we are all still here trading. Oil prices go up making it more difficult for the lower income person to buy gasoline... yet we are all still here. When grains tank the unhedged farmers get jammed... so they say... yet we are still here shorting like mad. Imagine if they started a chat board!
I'm not going to trade it. Not from any sort of moral standpoint, but out of pure will to keep my money. Seeing how crooked the government is already makes me suspect this market, directly operated by the government will be more crooked than 5 miles of bad moutain road. Here's what I can easily see happening. BJ Investing (having given a zillion dollars to various politicians) takes a huge position. Little guys (like us) seeing an advantage take the other side. Down the road, whatever BJ was betting on fails to happen, and they are facing huge losses. So, they call up the politicians they own and get the trades busted, or cancelled, or the market shut down, or something such that they don't have to pay. That's just one scam out of many likely scenarios. It's gonna be bad news, IMO.
sounds like an idea that the left would love to twist, as they apparently have, looking at the article.
IMO it only shows how desperate and clueless US Intelligence services really are. These FBI, CIA and Pentagon guys just can't stop making fools of themselves.
Is this for real? I first heard of this on drudereport.com this morning. I then saw it on all the major news portals (yahoo etc,) but now its gone from all the major sites. How can this possibly be real?
If this is a real program then it will not happen and will be shut down by congress. DARPA is an interesting agency: They unfortunately have in recent years lost perspective and ventured into poorly thought out research initiatives. Orginally DARPA projects were rock solid types of endeavors. Today they seem less focused and confused. If what DARPA meant to establish were economic index futures based upon particualr country or regional economies then they might have had an idea worth exploring: however the major exchanges would be the choice for implementation not DARPA which by virtue of its participation in the initiaitive has effectively scuttled the program .....