Why catching insider trading is so tricky nowadays, and just how helpful is it for kids to sleep in?
Why catching insider trading is so tricky nowadays, and just how helpful is it for kids to sleep in? Scott Olson/Getty Images You're reading a
Why catching insider trading is so tricky nowadays, and just how helpful is it for kids to sleep in? Scott Olson/Getty Images You're reading a preview of the brand new newsletter from The Indicator from Planet Money. Once a week, we're curating our favorite stories and insights on business, finance, economics and adding context on why they matter. Subscribe here to get it in your inbox every Friday. Today's Indicator: >$400,000 Insider trading is a problem. So how do we stop it? It's a real profitable time to have access to privileged information. An American soldier allegedly used classified information to turn $33,000 into more than $400,000. But millions of dollars more have been made through eerily well-timed bets on prediction markets like Polymarket. For example, when the U.S. would bomb Iran, or capture Venezuela's Nicolás Maduro. Sponsor Message If you're a Congressman with access to this kind of information, it seems illegal to bet on it, right?! It's not so simple. We looked at Polymarket specifically to understand why this is so hard to police. The difficulty comes in how the company is structured. It does have a U.S.-regulated front-end at home. But the REAL action happens on the back-end: a largely anonymous, crypto-based international platform. When big bets are made there, it's harder to see who is actually doing the betting.
U.S. Democratic Senator Richard Blumenthal doesn't want prediction markets to have it both ways. SO! He introduced legislation to make them act more like regulated sportsbooks (FanDuel, DraftKings, and some other combined word with CapitalLetters). Hopefully, that would cut down on anonymity and reduce potential insider trading. While anonymity is certainly easier with cryptocurrency, transactions are written into the blockchain and therefore permanent. We get into all that in the episode. Listen to the full episode. Rest of the Week News We're Watching 1. Is it POSSIBLE to meet this level of electricity demand? What to know: The scale of new electricity demand is shocking (always pun intended). At a recent conference, an exec at Oncor, a large utility in Texas, said they're getting SO many requests from customers (data centers being the prime example) that they're forecasting 122 GW of demand on their system over the next five years. As of now, if you step on the gas of Texas's primary grid, ERCOT, it can deliver 85 GW of power at most at one time. In other words, ONE UTILITY would need to increase the energy that Texas can currently offer by… ~143%. Sponsor Message Jon Wellinghoff, former chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), describes the current demand as "off the charts." He says the typical increase in power demand is less than 2% year-over-year.
The BriefWire