Markets can be used to predict things by extracting information from the crowds. Every individual person has an incentive to do the best analysis he can and use all the information he can to make a return. And so the rest of the world can look at the prices and get an idea of what the best assessments out there are.

The US intelligence community, some years back, started trying to establish a futures market on things like assassinations, because having a powerful predictive tool to know in advance when something happens could be useful. It was controversial – probably helped by the rather scary logo of the Information Awareness Office, the guys working on it – but one point raised that caused it to be shot down is that the establishment of a market where people are betting on an outcome can affect the outcome if the bettors can act to affect the outcome. Like, say I make purchases in the market that are betting really hard on the unlikely probability that some world leader is going to be shot in the next week. I might just run out and get myself a rifle and make myself a whole lot of money.

The decision was that that was a pretty serious misincentive, and so the idea of having a futures market on assassinations was dumped.

But, coming back to the current situation, if one believes that one can push the situation one way or another, it might be that an organization could place a considerable bet and then try to swing things.