The Logbook: That time the U.S. prevented the launch of a government-funded geopolitical prediction market

We’ve previously written about Intrade, a now-defunct prediction market that caught mainstream attention in 2003 when traders on the platform predicted the capture of Saddam Hussein before media outlets reported it.

This event boosted Intrade’s brand, letting it continue to grow for nearly a decade. The irony of the Intrade-Saddam Hussein event was that around the same time, U.S. officials had just finished shutting down a government-backed project called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM), which was a proposed futures exchange for trading on geopolitical events in the Middle East.