>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/3106559.stm
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>Cost effective insight
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>Senator Wyden explained the system by saying: "You may think early on that Prime Minister X is going to be assassinated. So you buy the futures contracts for 5 cents each.
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>"The payoff if he is assassinated is $1 per futures. So if it comes to pass, those who bought at 5 cents make 95 cents and those who bought at 50 cents make 50 cents."
This mad scheme does have a possible silver lining though. If enough of us were prepared to bet large sums that GW Bush would not be assassinated by Dec 31 2003, perhaps that might prompt someone to take all those bets? It might even occur to someone with an entrepreneurial spirit that they could win the bet (and thus all the money we had waged against such a horrible crime) by taking some pro-active steps to ensure a favourable outcome?
Essentially, the Pentagon's "Policy Analysis Market (PAM)" would become a perfectly legal, even government sponsored, method for putting out a contract on a public figure. Which is unlikely to be an accidental outcome, given that the pentagon is, after all, the premier international criminal organisation of the modern world.
Nevertheless, privatisation of their criminal endeavours might not be all bad. There is almost a 'democratic' flavour to the notion that millions of us "little people" around the world could put our pennies together to encourage a hit on some really unpopular world leader.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas