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By Carlo Versano and Hugh Cameron

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America has always been a land of grifters. Inside dealers, pay-to-play schemers, elected officials in both parties whose investment portfolios had an uncanny habit of outperforming the market. What’s new about that? Let’s start with the brazenness. The almost performative shamelessness of it. As though the old norms didn’t just erode but were suddenly bulldozed away, like the remnants of a wing of the White House: visible for all to see, if not publicly debate.

Welcome to the golden era of corruption. Bring cash. Or, better yet, well-timed futures contracts.

At 6:49 a.m. ET on Monday, March 23, someone—we’ll probably never know who—placed roughly $500 million in oil and equities futures trades, betting that oil prices were about to fall and the broader market would rally, per market data reviewed by Newsweek. Even though there was no public information to suggest an imminent major geopolitical development that would significantly move those markets in tandem, it turned out to be a good bet. Fifteen minutes later, at 7:04 a.m., President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the U.S. had begun ceasefire talks with Iran and would be postponing planned strikes on the country’s energy grid. Oil prices immediately plunged. Markets rallied. Whomever placed those trades pocketed a fortune.

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Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, called it “mind-blowing corruption.” Veteran futures trader Mike Khouw, who has spent a career watching unusual market activity, put it more diplomatically to Newsweek: “You’re betting that the equity markets are going to rally and that crude’s going to plummet sharply and fast—and then for a post from the president to come out only minutes later. There are coincidences. I’m not going to deny that. But boy, that’s a few.” This is the part of the story where, in a healthier era—one with institutions that still worked and a public not riven by political polarization—you might expect to read about a federal investigation being opened. The Securities and Exchange Commission dispatching forensic analysts. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission demanding records. After all, these agencies exist to protect the integrity of markets. However, the SEC’s enforcement director had resigned a week earlier, after just six months on the job. The CFTC had been hollowed out, with a new handpicked advisory board made up of prediction market and crypto CEOs. The Department of Justice’s public integrity division, gutted.

The March 23 futures trade is just one thread in what has become a deeply troubling pattern for those of us still—perhaps naively—invested in the idea that America’s promise is predicated on a sense of fairness and integrity. A confluence of suspicious trades, compromised watchdogs and a regulatory environment that critics say has effectively issued a signed, sealed and delivered invitation to anyone with access to material nonpublic information and a brokerage account.

The Trades That Raised Eyebrows

The March 23 trades were not subtle. According to exchange data cited by Reuters, between 6:49 and 6:50 a.m., somewhere between 5,100 and 6,200 Brent and West Texas Intermediate crude futures contracts changed hands—more than half a billion dollars in notional value, in a single minute, in a market that is typically quiet at that hour. Simultaneously, as much as $2 billion in S&P 500-linked futures contracts changed hands while an estimated $580 million in oil futures was dumped. Two trades, almost concurrent, each perfectly predictive of what was about to happen. A day later, per the Wall Street Journal, White House staff were warned against using their positions to place well‑timed futures bets.

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Khouw, who has advised on options strategy for CNBC and managed portfolios through multiple market cycles, walked through the mechanics. The margin reserve requirement for a speculator on those contracts alone—roughly $24,000 to $25,000 per contract—means whoever placed this trade had tens of millions of dollars committed, in the premarket, on a Monday morning, with extraordinary conviction. “This is not some retail market participant,” he said flatly. “Gotta raise some eyebrows.”

That it did. What it has not yet done, at least publicly, is trigger any sort of regulatory response commensurate with the scale of what occurred. In a news cycle that can be measured in hours, if not minutes, any public outrage was muted, replaced by the cycle’s next outrage. Market manipulation? Seems tame, all things considered. Who can keep up?

The same thing appears to have happened again less than three hours before Trump announced a two-week ceasefire agreement with Iran on April 7, with investors placing an approximately $950 million bet—a combined 8,600 lots of Brent and U.S. crude futures—on oil prices falling, according to London Stock Exchange Group data.

The whales who bet big on imminent dovish developments in the war at least made money. According to a recent Financial Times report, a Morgan Stanley wealth manager acting as a broker for Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth contacted BlackRock in February seeking a multimillion-dollar position in the iShares Defense Industrials Active ETF—a fund whose holdings include defense industry heavyweights like RTX, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and Palantir—on behalf of Hegseth. The trade was flagged internally by BlackRock and ultimately did not go through, because the fund wasn’t yet available on Morgan Stanley’s trading platform. (The Pentagon called the notion that Hegseth’s broker tried to frontrun the war “entirely false and fabricated.”)

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The attempt was made in the weeks before the February 28 U.S.-Israeli strike on Iran, per the FT. But even had it been executed, it would not have netted much in the way of profit. The ETF in question was trading, under the ticker IDEF, slightly less where it was in mid-February, as of March 27 market close. Sometimes even the siren call of insider information isn’t enough to outplay market whims.

Meanwhile, the cop on the beat specifically created to monitor such things is nowhere to be found. Remember our SEC enforcement chief, who suddenly resigned mid-March after six months on the job? Margaret Ryan had wanted to pursue fraud cases more aggressively—including cases that touched the president’s circle—and ran into resistance from SEC Chair Paul Atkins and other Republican appointees, according to sources cited by Reuters. Her departure was, in the clinical language of Washington, voluntary. What about the DOJ? It contains a Public Integrity Section, a division created after Watergate to go after government corruption. Of the 36 full-time attorneys employed in that division on the day Trump was inaugurated, only two remain. Nothing to see here, folks.

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The House Always Wins

If legacy markets offer the old-fashioned version of insider trading—futures contracts, brokerage accounts, paper trails that regulators can theoretically follow—the new crop of wildly popular prediction markets offer something newer, murkier and in some ways more alarming.

Platforms like Polymarket and Kalshi allow users to bet real money on real-world outcomes, with markets “resolving” once an event occurs: Will the U.S. strike Iran by February 28? (Market resolves to 100 percent). Will there be a ceasefire in March? (Market resolves to 0 percent). Will Jesus Christ come back in 2026? (4 percent chance). Will Jeffrey Epstein? (5 percent). Over $500 million was wagered on the timing of U.S. strikes on Iran alone. And in the days before the strikes materialized, something interesting happened.

According to blockchain analytics firm Bubblemaps, six accounts collectively made $1.2 million on those war contracts. One of them had joined Polymarket in February, had never placed a bet on any other topic, and walked away with around $500,000. A similar picture emerged after U.S. special forces descended on Caracas and captured Nicolás Maduro in a stunning commando raid in January. An anonymous Polymarket account wagered $32,000 that the Venezuelan president’s downfall was imminent, just hours before Trump ordered the operation. They made $400,000.

Nicolas Vaiman, co-founder and CEO of Bubblemaps, was careful about what he would and wouldn’t conclude from the Iran bets. “In this case, those Polymarket accounts had no prior activity and only placed bets on the February 28 U.S. strike on Iran, the day before the strike,” he told Newsweek. “This was compelling for us to share.” Polymarket trades are settled on the blockchain—the anonymous backbone of the crypto industry—so even if we had a functionaly SEC or CFTC or DOJ, the odds of figuring out the profiteer? Market resolves to 0 percent.

CNN separately reported that a single Polymarket trader hit 93 percent of their Iran-related wagers over two years—mostly concerning the likelihood and timing of U.S. and Israeli military actions. Ninety-three percent. In a domain where the most informed analysts in the world struggle to forecast with that accuracy, someone was batting like Aaron Judge in the spring.

Later, in the hours before Trump’s April 7 ceasefire announcement, dozens of newly created Polymarket accounts with no apparent trading history placed highly specific bets on the outcome, the Associated Press first reported, citing public blockchain data. Polymarket later labeled the market “disputed” pending clarification over whether the ceasefire conditions had been fully met.

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The Referee Has Left the Building

None of this exists in a vacuum. The prediction market boom has unfolded against a backdrop of deliberate, systematic regulatory retreat—and a set of financial relationships that, charitably described, do not inspire confidence in the neutrality of the referees.

Donald Trump Jr. is a strategic adviser to Kalshi. He’s also a partner at Polymarket backer 1789 Capital and joined the platform’s advisory board after 1789 invested last year. Trump Media & Technology Group is launching its own crypto-based prediction market, Truth Predict, positioning Truth Social as what it calls “the world’s first social media platform” with integrated event contract trading. The president’s eldest son is embedded in the two dominant prediction platforms. The president’s company is building a third.

That blurring of public authority and private gain extends beyond prediction markets. The Guardian reported that Emil Michael, a senior Pentagon official overseeing military AI policy, sold a private stake in Elon Musk’s xAI for up to $24 million after the Defense Department entered into agreements with the company while he still held shares.

The man Trump appointed to chair the CFTC, Michael Selig, has been a vocal advocate for treating prediction market contracts as legitimate financial instruments under federal law rather than as gambling—a distinction that matters enormously for how, and how aggressively, they can be regulated. Since Selig’s appointment, the CFTC dropped a Biden-era probe into Polymarket over whether it was operating as an unregistered derivatives exchange. It withdrew a proposed rule that would have banned certain event contracts—specifically political and sports betting markets, the most lucrative and legally fraught categories. The message transmitted to the market, intentionally or not, was clear: The adults have left the room, and the door is open.

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“I fear that our regulators have ushered in a climate where people feel free to do anything they want,” said Ben Schiffrin, a former SEC associate general counsel who now leads securities policy at the advocacy group Better Markets. “I recently saw a former CFTC attorney quoted as saying something like, ‘It’s a great time to be a white-collar criminal.’ And it appears that is, in fact, the case.”

To be fair, not everyone reads the picture the same way. Adam Michel, director of tax policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, argues regulators should be careful not to conflate being right with breaking the law. “Informed trading is what makes markets, especially prediction markets, useful in the first place,” he said, noting that Martha Stewart was famously never charged with insider trading—prosecutors went after her for obstruction and false statements because the underlying case was too hard to prove. But he still wonders what happens when unilateral government decisions can move trillions of dollars, and the incentive to obtain and act on nonpublic information becomes almost irresistible. The solution, in his view and that of libertarians everywhere, is less government influence over markets—not more enforcement of the system that actually exists.

Perhaps that’s a compelling argument. It is also, notably, not the one the government is making on behalf of its own citizens. What it is making, through its actions, is a rather different case: that the rules apply selectively, the watchdogs have been leashed and the window for consequence-free speculation on government secrets is, for now, wide open.

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A Darker Backdrop

To understand how America arrived here, it helps to zoom out. And when you zoom out far enough, you keep arriving at the same name. Yes, that one. Jeffrey Epstein has been dead since 2019. The circumstances of his death remain contested. But the files his long-running case generated—tens of thousands of pages released in tranches by the DOJ under congressional mandate—have continued to land like depth charges in the reputations of the powerful. Bankers. Politicians. Royals. Lobbyists. Men whose names appear in ways that range from uncomfortable to incriminating, across documents that the DOJ has, in several notable instances, chosen to redact in apparent violation of the very statute requiring their disclosure.

The Epstein files are not, strictly speaking, a corruption story in the same register as insider trading. But they share the same underlying condition: the belief, held by a remarkable number of powerful men (and some women) over a remarkable number of years, that the rules—legal, moral, financial—did not apply to them. That access and proximity to power created a kind of immunity. That the system, if it noticed at all, would look the other way. This was, in a sense, the argument that brought Trump back to power in 2024. Drain the swap. Reveal how the system is rigged. If only.

The Epstein saga has produced no American prosecutions. They have, however, produced a roster of prominent names appearing in contexts that range from merely embarrassing to deeply troubling. Those repeatedly referenced in the files include: President Trump, former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, former President Bill Clinton, Steve Bannon, former Barclays CEO Jes Staley and his onetime boss, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon.

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The contrast with Britain is stark. Across the Atlantic, the Epstein files have produced actual consequences. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor—formerly Prince Andrew—was arrested on February 19, his 66th birthday, on suspicion of misconduct in public office and later released under investigation. Peter Mandelson, the veteran Labour Party politician, diplomat and (briefly) British ambassador to the U.S., was arrested on similar allegations. Former Norwegian Prime Minister Thorbjørn Jagland has been charged with aggravated corruption following an investigation tied to his Epstein connections. These are not the outcomes of a more aggressive or better-resourced legal system. Britain is pursuing these cases under a relatively archaic common law offense—misconduct in public office—that legal experts describe as a blunt instrument. What it has, that the U.S. currently lacks, is prosecutors willing to use it.

Bennett Gershman, a former prosecutor now teaching law at Pace University in New York, was asked about the difference in prosecution strategies on either side of the pond. “I don’t think anybody is going to be prosecuted [here],” he said. “If you prosecute anybody, somebody might say—what about Trump?” The president’s name, he noted, is “pervasive in the papers.” The DOJ, he added, “is not independent. They’re totally political.” The essence of American inaction on Epstein, in his reading, is not legal complexity. It is political will, or the absence thereof. “The U.K. takes a neutral view of this,” Gershman observed. “It’s gotten political here.”

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There are flashes of accountability elsewhere, too. Israeli authorities have charged two people with using classified military intelligence to place bets on Polymarket. MrBeast, the YouTube phenom, fired a video editor who was suspended from Kalshi, the other major prediction market, for trading about $4,000 on markets related to the streamer. The editor has been referred to federal regulators for insider trading. Whether he’s prosecuted remains to be seen.

The Golden Era

There is a version of this story that is reassuring. In that version, the suspicious March 23 trades are being quietly investigated by people who cannot yet say so publicly. The Hegseth broker inquiry gets kicked up to the SEC’s best enforcement agents. The prediction market platforms, newly chastened, enforce their own rules with genuine rigor. No more trading on the Second Coming, for starters. The Epstein documents, fully unredacted, eventually find their way into the hands of prosecutors who follow them wherever they lead. The institutions hold.

This version requires a considerable act of faith—in agencies whose regulators are resigning or being shown the door, whose proposed rules are being quietly withdrawn, whose investigative appetite has been visibly shaped by political proximity to the very conduct under scrutiny.

What the evidence suggests instead is that America is not quite in the golden era promised by the Trump administration. Or maybe it is, depending on how close your office sits to the corridors of power. That the accumulation of advantages—weakened regulators, captive oversight bodies, a president whose family is financially embedded in the least regulated corners of the financial system and a Justice Department that has demonstrated a consistent preference for redaction over accountability—has created conditions that are, for those with access and nerve, genuinely new and extraordinary. A great time to be a white-collar criminal, as the former CFTC attorney put it. A golden era indeed.

Photo-illustration by Justin Metz for Newsweek

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