Treason in the Futures Markets
paulkrugman.substack.com
Treason in the Futures Markets
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Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#2[deleted]
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#3None of this is any surprise to people who had two brain cells to rub together. He showed massive corruption in his first term, and despite being impeached twice, got away with it scot free. Then got a huge mandate from the people to be a shitty person, so yeah, he’s corrupt. The majority of voting Americans don’t really seem to care.
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#4While I agree it is very suspicious, needs investigating and far, far greater oversight in general, I'm not sure there is enough to conclude this definitely is insider trading. Markets are weird. People trade for weird reasons, sometimes gently and in small size, sometimes aggressively and all at once. We're zooming in at a short window just before the tweet. If you look at random windows you'll find these too. 6.49 am is around lunchtime in Europe, and people exist there too. Crude oil liquidity isnt at its peak at that time but certainly not "thin". It's really not that uncommon for traders to accidentally send a "fat finger" trade, much bigger in size than intended or appropriate for the market conditions.
I'm not trying to split hairs here. There's been plenty of weird coincidences and each should be investigated, and on the balance of probability at least one may well be insider trading at the highest echelons. And in any case, in any financial job you need pre clearance for trades, often justifying why you're doing them if they are odd enough. There are minimum holding periods, day trading is not allowed, and the full record auditable by regulators. It is insane to me that politicians are not subject to such rules and it must change.
But to conclude that a weird trading pattern is definitely insider trading is IMO cheap. It's like TV drama where the unemployed, wife-beater-wearing husband definitely killed the wife, end of story.
The real tragedy IMO is that this is really avoidable. It would take very basic, very standard regulation to stamp this out, and we wouldn't be debating this in a technology forum.
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#5[flagged]
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#6While I agree it is very suspicious, needs investigating and far, far greater oversight in general, I'm not sure there is enough to conclude this definitely is insider trading. Markets are weird. People trade for weird reasons, sometimes gently and in small size, sometimes aggressively and all at once. We're zooming in at a short window just before the tweet. If you look at random windows you'll find these too. 6.49…
The quantity makes it more than weird. This is not just price change or manipulation. Prices can move big amounts for weird reasons without significant changes in trade volumes. The volume of sales makes it significant.
$580 million sales of oil futures and probably similar amount of buys in stock futures means $1T quick billion move.
Nobody makes half trillion __trades__ for weird reasons and this was too short to be movement of sellers in general.
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#7[flagged]
The $580MM transaction described in the article is already 1,000 times larger than the alleged congressional insider trading by Paul Pelosi that caused Sen. Hawley to introduce the PELOSI act.
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#8While I agree it is very suspicious, needs investigating and far, far greater oversight in general, I'm not sure there is enough to conclude this definitely is insider trading. Markets are weird. People trade for weird reasons, sometimes gently and in small size, sometimes aggressively and all at once. We're zooming in at a short window just before the tweet. If you look at random windows you'll find these too. 6.49…
The quantity makes it more than weird. This is not just price change or manipulation. Prices can move big amounts for weird reasons without significant changes in trade volumes. The volume of sales makes it significant. $580 million sales of oil futures and probably similar amount of buys in stock futures means $1T quick billion move. Nobody makes half trillion __trades__ for weird reasons and this was too short to b…
*580 million
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#9"Treason" seems a bit much. We put a very high bar on that term because it comes with the most serious consequences.
The fact that nobody seems particularly surprised by it suggests that the damage is long since done.
Re: Treason in the Futures Markets
#10Excuse my ignorance, but why can't this be traced? It's not crypto wallets, why is there no transparency here?