Are there administration insiders profiting from knowing news about the war with Iran before the public does? Recent news stories from the world of “prediction markets” seem to indicate that may in fact be happening.
Just fifteen minutes before President Donald Trump announced that the U.S. would cease targeting Iranian oil infrastructure after “productive negotiations,” someone placed a $580 million bet on the oil futures market. The trade was placed at 6:50am on March 23. Trump’s announcement came at 7:05am.
“This has got to be investigated,” says Peter Schweizer on the most recent podcast of The Drill Down. “We don’t know that it was somebody in the inner circle. It could be one of their aides. But this is the stuff that makes people cynical and rightfully makes people angry.”
Schweizer wrote the book on insider trading by Congress in 2012, “Throw Them All Out,” which led to action to require lawmakers to document every stock trade they make. But a lot has changed since that book was published, including the exponential growth of “prediction markets” run by companies like Polymarket and Kalshi which operate with almost no regulation. A trader on Polymarket with the user handle of “Magamyman” made $553,000 by correctly predicting the death of Iran’s ayatollah just before the airstrike that killed him.
“He has a 93 percent success rate in wagers he made based on U.S. and Israeli actions against Iran,” Schweizer notes.
This has led to speculation that insider knowledge is being shared from the highest levels of the administration. The White House has flatly denied that anyone in Trump’s orbit was involved in any of these lucrative trades, but it is worth pointing out that Donald Trump Jr., the president’s son, is an adviser to Polymarket and his venture capital firm, 1789 Capital, has invested millions into the controversial business.
Eggers adds that he is constantly reminded that there is a large time gap between when a new technology enters the world, like “prediction markets” that are similar to sports betting, “and the regulatory framework develops to figure out how to use it responsibly.” Unlike the regulated stock, commodity, and futures exchanges, these prediction markets are “the Wild West,” he says.
Even for that $580 million score on the oil futures market, however, the regulatory setup is understaffed. “The Commodities Futures Trading Commission is supposed to have five commissioners. It currently has one,” Eggers says.
“There’s a lot of money to be made,” Schweizer agrees, pointing out that six prediction market traders have been spotted who made a combined $1.2 million on Polymarket just hours before the Feb. 24 beginning of the Iran war.
“This undermines peoples’ belief and respect for authority, because this information is obviously coming from somewhere,” Schweizer adds.
Gambling and related businesses are enormously profitable, Schweizer says, telling a story from his own youth. “When I was young, I went to Las Vegas for an academic event. My father gave me some spending money and a copy of a Wall Street Journal story about how owning a casino was the most profitable business in America,” Schweizer recalls. “He didn’t tell me not to gamble. He just said, ‘Here’s your spending money, and have a look at this!’”
On the show, Schweizer and Eggers also discuss the truly horrifying story of China’s forced organ harvesting businesses. Author Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times has spent twenty years researching China’s internal repression of its people. His newest book tells a terrifying story about how the regime is actually cutting out and selling the internal organs of its political dissidents. Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary details the shocking crime of forced organ harvesting in the People’s Republic.
Drawing first on Jekielek’s expertise in China, Eggers asks whether Trump’s actions against first Venezuela and then Iran are really directed at China, which has been getting most of its oil from these two countries specifically.
“China is America’s greatest adversary,” Jekielek agrees. “It’s a great idea to use these entities as a proxy against China… China imports a wild amount of oil.”
Trump’s actions, he says, have the effect of increasing U.S. leverage on China in order to counter the economic power China has gained against the U.S., noting that China has especially developed leverage with its stock of rare earth minerals that are so important to high technology products.
Turning to the focus of the book, Jekielek says there is a long regime practice of creating “black classes” in Chinese society, scapegoating a minority for the sake of getting the rest of the population distracted.
“In 1999, a group called the Falun Gong became the black class,” Jekielek says, and in its persecution of this religious group China imprisoned its members, then created a business around cutting out their internal organs to sell. “They grew this business on the backs of the Falun Gong,” Jekielek tells the hosts. His book details the history, and how the practice extended to other so-called black classes, including China’s minority Muslim population known as Uyghurs, which is still being actively oppressed by the communist regime today.
“Can you actually trust a regime or government that does this sort of thing to its own people?” asks Schweizer. “I think we all know the answer to that is ‘probably no.’ So, I would encourage everybody to pick up Jan’s book. It’s terrific. Killed to Order. It’s going to tell you about the organ harvesting situation. It’s also going to tell you about the nature of the Chinese system. And as he points out in the subtitle, it explains why China is our biggest adversary,” Schweizer says.
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