Economy

Surprises happen people want to know what does this mean what’s going to happen what’s driving it

Most traders are not good at everything

Betting markets are just following the experts on quantitative questions

Tara Sinclair an economist at George Washington University agrees that is likely

If crowd were to supplant professional forecasters individual bettors would lose out

Intrade focused on elections and world events and were fairly accurate

More than $60 million is at stake on platforms on political and economic questions on any given day

Professional analysts may have conflicts of interest such as their firm's trading commissions

Polymarket bettors forecast corporate earnings more accurately than analysts

Prediction markets incentivize you to state your true beliefs

First online prediction markets emerged in early 2000s

Getting information from a large pool of people can be a good form of forecasting Jonathan Wright said

Analysts may avoid publishing earnings forecasts that are out of the norm

Economists expected the latest jobs report to show about 68000 jobs added last month

The crowd is good at predicting interest rate decisions from the Federal Reserve and better than professionals at predicting inflation rate

Anonymous online gamblers expected to see 54000 new jobs

Congress determined Federal Reserve can best achieve its mission as independent agency without politics

Should Fed change course give in to political pressure history does not bode well for US inflation

Increase in political pressure by half as much as Nixon's pressure for six months raises US price level more than 8%

Countries with more independent central banks tend to enjoy lower inflation on average