A 2008 paper by Arindrajit Dube, Ethan Kaplan, and Suresh Naidu found evidence that the CIA and/or members of the Executive branch either disclosed or acted on information about top-secret authorizations of coups. Stocks in “highly exposed” firms rose more in the pre-coup authorization phase than they did when the coup was actually launched.
Now sports fans, given the fact that there’s reason to believe that people in the intelligence with access to privileged information weren’t above leaking it to people who could take advantage of it, why should we expect things to be different now? And given what has already been revealed about the NSA’s data gathering, if you were a clever trader and had access to this information, how would you mine it? How would you go about finding patterns or events to exploit?
Phi Beta Iota: The White House, the Department of the Treasury, and spies — in that order — learned to love off the books money when Yamashito's gold was captured in the Philippines and the Black Lily Trust was created in a value today probably in the hundreds of billions of dollars. That money was used to covertly fund the restoration of fascists in Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the Viet-Nam era the CIA learned how to run drugs and launder money on a global scale. Under Reagan the Iran-Contra scandal and the activities of Ted Shackley saw massive movements of arms, drugs, and money. More recently the crack cocaine scandal in Los Angeles found CIA Director John Deutch legitimately embarrassed by activities undertaken by elements of the CIA not under his control. Evidently NSA has become addicted to insider trading and NSA probably has an off-shore account worth billions — the question is WHO in NSA has the keys to the money vault — it probably is NOT the director or former directors. It's a shame the FBI is inept and inattentive (by design) on this internal threat.
