When You Are Too Corrupt for JP Morgan………

JPMorgan has terminated their relationship with the online gambling site Polymarket.

JPMorgan Chase terminated its banking relationship with Polymarket last year over regulatory concerns, underscoring escalating worries in the industry over fast-growing prediction platforms.

JPMorgan notified Polymarket that it needed to find a new bank in October, according to people familiar with the matter. Polymarket is now working with a new lender, the identity of which could not be confirmed. 

At the time, Polymarket was banned from allowing US customers to use its platform following a 2022 enforcement action by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission for operating an unregistered derivatives trading platform. 

The CFTC under the Trump administration allowed New York-based Polymarket to re-enter the US last year, though the agency has an ongoing investigation into the company, the FT reported in June.

Gambling is a great way to launder money, and has been shown with both Polymarket and Kalshi, it is an even better way to engage in insider trading. 

Whatever JPMorgan saw, it's worse than what is publicly known.

That ain't good. 

Bummer

A federal judge has stayed the Minnesota law banning predictions markets.

This is temporary, so Minnesoto might still prevail, but the injunction is disappointing.

The bookies Kalshi and Polymarket, along with the Trump DoJ claimed that these were swaps, not betting.

It's not a surprise that Trump is a big supporter of this sort of gambling.  He and his family are deep into the so-called "Prediction Markets",  Also, there is compelling evidence that members of his administration are using the markets to insider trade.

Corruption is as corruption does.

As I have noted for well over a decade, swaps are basically just betting, not insurance, which should have been banned via a legal framework dating back to the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, which prevented people from doing the equivalent of getting paid for burning down their neighbors house.

A federal judge on Monday blocked a Minnesota state law that would ban prediction markets days before it was set to go into effect, siding with a federal financial regulator and two companies that had sued to stop it.

In May, Minnesota became the first state to pass a law making it a felony for most prediction markets to locally operate and advertise. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission, a federal agency that oversees prediction markets, and the markets Kalshi and Polymarket sued, arguing that the platforms can be regulated only at the federal level.

On Monday, Judge Kate M. Menendez of the U.S. District Court for the District of Minnesota granted a preliminary injunction to halt the law from going into effect on Saturday, finding that the companies faced a threat of irreparable harm. The law will remain on hold until a final ruling is made in the case.

………

The agency has faced criticism for making what appear to be favorable decisions for prediction markets with ties to the Trump family. Donald Trump Jr. advises Kalshi and Polymarket, and he backs Polymarket financially.

President Trump has posted on Truth Social that the agency, not states, must have “exclusive authority” over prediction markets.

 

A Deceptive Bookie? Hoocoodanode?

It has been discovered that Polymarket paid influencers to create videos of fake winnings as a part of their marketing campaign.

The technical term for this is, "Fraud," and in the less enlightened past, people were sent to prison over this.

Polymarket has been banned from letting U.S. users trade on its website since 2022. But the company is waging a secret campaign for Americans’ attention on social media, paying creators to film trades on fake websites and hiring overseas workers to make the videos go viral in the U.S., a Wall Street Journal investigation found.

The campaign bolstered the perception that Polymarket lets users make fast and easy money, as the company attempts to bring its offshore website back to the U.S.

………

We reviewed more than 1,100 videos made by 10 of Polymarket’s more than 100 creators. In 70% of the videos, creators appeared to place a bet on websites that looked nearly identical to Polymarket, but were actually dummy sites the company used to film fake trades. Many of the creators didn’t disclose they were paid by Polymarket until we reached out.

Around 10% of the videos went even further, adding outdated footage or fake headlines to imply they won their bets. Those videos depicted the creators winning almost $900,000. We traced how each bet would have actually been resolved and found that in reality, the creators—and anyone who had placed identical bets—would actually have lost more than $166,000.

………

Polymarket gave its creators bulletpointed scripts and reviewed videos before publishing, people who have worked with the company said. If a video was obviously faked, the creator would be asked to remake it.

Fraud and insider trading are not prediction markets. 

Of Course He Did

Remember serial (and surreal) fraudster and former Congressman George Santos?

Well, he is back in the news, because he announced that he would be attending the State of the Union address and then bet that he would not be there on Kalshi, and then did not show up.

George Santos may be the latest individual caught trading on insider information in a prediction market.

According to NPR, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) is examining whether the former New York congressman placed bets on Kalshi using nonpublic details about his own plans. The market in question centered on whether Santos would attend President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address in February.

In the days leading up to the State of the Union address, Santos posted a video on X stating he would appear in the event. That public confirmation pushed the odds of his attendance on Kalshi close to 75% the night before the event, drawing millions of dollars in wagers across related markets. Santos did not show up to the State of the Union address, however. During the speech he posted on X that he was watching from an airport television instead. The odds on his attendance collapsed shortly afterward.

The first thing learned (more accurately re-learned) is that George Santos is a cheap bunco artist.

The second thing learned is that this is a feature, and not a bug of the, "Prediction markets." 

About Someone Banned This Crap

Minnesota has just passed a law banning prediction markets. (Utah seems likely to follow

About f%$#ing time.  This is a profoundly wasteful, corrupt, and unproductive activity.

Of course, because it is a corrupt activity, and one of Trump's sons is on the payroll of the two largest players in the space, Polymarket and Kalshi, so the Trump administration promptly sued to prevent the law from going into effect.

The Trump administration yesterday sued Minnesota in an attempt to block the first state law that prohibits prediction markets.

While other states imposed restrictions on prediction markets, Minnesota banned them outright in a law signed by Gov. Tim Walz on Monday. The US Commodity Futures Trading Commission announced a lawsuit against the state, saying that Minnesota’s “new legislation represents the most aggressive move by a state to shut down CFTC-regulated markets and undermine the federal regulatory regime set up by Congress more than 50 years ago.”

………

The Minnesota law makes it a felony to create, operate, or advertise a prediction market. The CFTC asked the court for preliminary and permanent injunctions to prohibit Minnesota from enforcing the law, which is scheduled to take effect on August 1. The case was filed in US District Court for the District of Minnesota.

………

The Minnesota law defines a prediction market as “a system that allows consumers to place a wager on the future outcome of a specified event that is not determined or affected by the performance of the parties to the contract.” The law’s specified events include but are not limited to sports games, wars, mass shootings, acts of terrorism, elections, court cases, deaths or assassinations, weather conditions, and pop culture events such as awards or release dates.

That last bit sounds an awful lot like the Marine Insurance Act of 1746, which was an unalloyed good.

Shut them down. 

Surprisingly Good News

The US Senate has adopted a rule forbidding its members from betting in prediction markets.

Since this is a Senate rule, and not legislation, this goes into effect without a vote of the House or a Presidential signature.

Now, how about banning the whole corrupt enterprise? 

US senators voted unanimously to ban themselves from making bets on prediction markets yesterday, about a week after Kalshi said it caught three congressional candidates betting on their own campaigns.

The resolution to prohibit senators from trading on prediction markets passed yesterday by unanimous consent. The action amends the Senate’s conflict-of-interest rules and does not require approval by the House of Representatives. The House has a pending resolution that would impose a similar rule on its own members.

“United States Senators have no business engaging in speculative activities like prediction markets while collecting a taxpayer-funded paycheck, period,” said Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio), who introduced the resolution. “Serving in Congress should never be about finding new ways to profit; it should be about delivering results for the American people.”

Moreno’s resolution applies broadly to all bets on prediction markets, not just those related to events of which a senator has inside knowledge. The Senate also adopted an amendment submitted by Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.), which extends the trading ban to Senate officers and employees. Padilla said in a statement that the rule as amended “is a commonsense step to ensure that senators and their staff cannot use their positions of public trust to line their own pockets.”

The only question now is how lackadaisical the Senate will be in actually enforcing this.

Gee, What a Surprise

Nothing to see here, move along.Polymarket, the gamble on anything in their casino futures market company, has announced that it will not pay out on the bets regarding the attack on Venezuela.

I'd rather they just out whoever it was in the Trump administration who made the bet in the first place. 

Polymarket is disputing that the mission to capture Nicolás Maduro constituted an invasion and said it will only settle a prediction contract if the US military takes control of Venezuelan territory.

The decision by the prediction market has angered gamblers and added to the controversy surrounding a successful wager on the timing of Maduro’s capture that netted more than $400,000 in winnings for a mystery trader. The dispute over the definition of “invade” highlights just one of the controversies faced by the mostly unregulated industry.

Polymarket — which only recently gained regulatory approval to operate legally in the US — says on its website that it will resolve the “Will the US invade Venezuela by . . .?” contract if the US “commences a military offensive intended to establish control over any portion of Venezuela” by one of three dates. 

About That Australian Social Media Ban

It turns out that the ban was bankrolled by a group whose business was making gambling ads as an ultimately successful way to divert attention from proprosed regulations against them.

Well, now there is a surprise:

The birthplace of the 36 Months campaign and its influential push for Australia’s teen social media ban was in the boardroom of advertising production company FINCH.

36 Months managing director Greg Attwells said that the group was born during a single May 2024 meeting between him, FINCH founder Rob Galluzzo and Nova 96.9 radio host Michael “Wippa” Wipfli.

Elsewhere at FINCH, staff were hard at work on another campaign: TAB’s “Get Your Bet On”.

The television advert — which was New Zealand’s third-most complained-about ad in 2024 — is just one of the many gambling-related projects worked on by FINCH over the past 10 years.

While not previously reported on, FINCH’s gambling advertising work contrasts with the social campaign of 36 Months, an organisation that FINCH funded and had staffing overlap with.

It further complicates matters for the Australian government which, under pressure from 36 Months, chose to pursue the teen social media ban while failing to make any progress on gambling advertising reform.

………

In November, the Australian Financial Review reported that the government “is expected to abandon plans for a total ban on online gambling advertising, using the under-16 social media restrictions as cover to water down the policy”.

Mission accomplished.

To be clear, I do not support making gambling illegal, but I do support tightly regulating the whole exploitative media infrastructure that arises around it. 

Keep Him Out of the Hall of Fame

Baseball superstar Pete Rose has has died at age 83.

While there is no denying that Rose was a generational talent, but he gambled on baseball games both as a player and as a coach, and he was banned from baseball, and as such is ineligible for the Hall of Fame.

This ban should remain, not because he bet, but because he bet on baseball.

While there are many athletes who have done contemptible things, racism and bigotry, partner abuse, drug abuse, and murder, but these are crimes against the society as a whole, they are not crimes against the sport.

He keeps his record, the most hits of any ballplayer ever, but he should never be readmitted to baseball or installed to Cooperstown.