Pentagon Lets You Bid on Terrorism?

Elysdir writes "DARPA is creating an idea futures market, the Policy Analysis Market, to try to predict events in the Middle East. See Bloomberg article for more info." Read this article. I mean it. This is amazing. Update: 07/29 14:45 GMT by J : The NYT story claims "The White House also altered the Web site so that the potential events ... that were visible earlier in the day ... could no longer be seen," but those example images are still being served: Jordanian overthrow, bidding on assassinations, cool graphics... Update: 07/29 16:44 GMT by M : Looks like the publicity was too much.

Comments

This is a good idea.

[Numair]

Finally ... a combination of defense and capitalism. I personally think this is a great idea, and want to see more exploration in our country of exotic/non-conventional financial instruments used in very creative ways.

What they are doing here is taking the futures markets and orienting them around terrorism. Great idea! Anyone who remembers the mysterious short selling on airline stocks before 9/11 knows that some strange trades always occur in the name of greed.

Many people who respond to this article are going to say "well that's dumb, how can investors predict this stuff?" - they are missing the point. The point here is to allow all sorts of stupid trades, but to notice the weird ones - the ones which eerily mirror intelligence information. If DoD manages to pull off a half-decent TIA system, then this is a very useful component.

It's great that such ideas are being pursued by the government, rather than idle chatter among economists and academics. Somewhat of a shame that all of the ignorant/stupid people out there will shout loudly enough to get this thing shut down, though ...