Yahoo! News - Pentagon's Futures Market Plan Condemned: "The Pentagon (news - web sites) is setting up a stock-market style system in which investors would bet on terror attacks, assassinations and other events in the Middle East. Defense officials hope to gain intelligence and useful predictions while investors who guessed right would win profits.
The market would work this way. Investors would buy and sell futures contracts — essentially a series of predictions about what they believe might happen in the Mideast. Holder of a futures contract that came true would collect the proceeds of investors who put money into the market but predicted wrong.
A graphic on the market's Web page showed hypothetical futures contracts in which investors could trade on the likelihood that Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat (news - web sites) would be assassinated or Jordanian King Abdullah II would be overthrown.
Although the Web site described the Policy Analysis Market as "a market in the future of the Middle East," the graphic also included the possibility of a North Korea (news - web sites) missile attack.
That graphic was apparently removed from the Web site hours after the news conference in which Wyden and fellow Democratic Sen. Byron Dorgan (news, bio, voting record) of North Dakota criticizing the market.
Dorgan described it as useless, offensive and "unbelievably stupid." "
- posted by geoff @ #