Trading on Terror: Linking Financial Markets and War

[reprehensor]

http://www.heatherwokusch.com/columns/column49.html

The Pentagon's online "terror" futures market may have gone down in flames, but questions surrounding 9/11 insider trading and market rigging before the Iraq invasion still linger.

In a much-aligned plan the Pentagon described as "engaging and ... profitable," anonymous traders were invited to bet on the likelihood of Middle Eastern death and destruction; public outcry forced the "Policy Analysis Market" (PAM) plan to be yanked days before its scheduled launch.

But allegations about the ultimate "terror" futures market, 9/11 insider trading, have yet to be adequately addressed. It's known that just weeks before the attacks, speculative trading surged on companies to be hardest hit, such as those located in the World Trade Center. There was a rally in five-year US Treasury notes, the best investment in times of US crisis, and sales of airline-based put options (bets a stock's price will fall) increased sharply too; interestingly, many such put options were sold through a firm previously managed by top CIA director, A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard.

Estimates of 9/11 profit-taking are in the billions of dollars, and according to Dylan Ratigan of Bloomberg Business News, "This could very well be insider trading at the worst, most horrific, most evil use you've ever seen in your entire life. This would be one of the most extraordinary coincidences in the history of mankind if it was a coincidence."

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