Intrade Traffic Plummets

From the FT

The number of people using Intrade has plummeted since a US government crackdown late last year…At its peak, Intrade counted 112,000 users. At midday on Wednesday, the site said there were 509 – and 498 were guests.

The vanishing traffic raises questions about the predictive value of a market feted by journalists and academics as a pioneering gauge of public opinion.

The government failed to protect the public from CDOs plumped up with bad mortgages or from swindlers like Bernie Madoff but don’t worry when it comes to the markets that Arrow, Schelling, Smith, Hanson, Wolfers et al. said have “great potential for improving social welfare” the government has got it covered. Call me cynical but I suspect Intrade would have been better treated had it been a project of Goldman Sachs.

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