Comment Text:
It is deeply mistaken for the CFTC to eliminate election futures markets.
Elections have consequences. The outcome of an election can lead to significant shifts in policy that can strongly impact personal expectations about the future of our country and its economic conditions. Different policies can also change expectations about business investment and opportunities. Thus, having good information about expectations of future electoral outcomes is very valuable to the public.
Obtaining good information about election outcomes is hard. Polls are notoriously unreliable and suffer from significant biases. Expert commentary is frequently worse. Election futures markets, however, have appeared to have a pretty good track record.
Election futures markets use incentives to aggregate disparate information from lots of motivated, intelligent, or plugged in people. These markets give a real time, fairly accurate look on elections that can't be replicated elsewhere. I, personally, have used these markets as my primary source to understand likely election outcomes.
Eliminating these markets removes an important source of information with no corresponding benefit. The continued existence of these contracts is in the public interest. The notion that these contracts are "gaming" is to miss the incredible utility I have described.
In conclusion, the proposed rule is mistaken, and should be considerably revised to permit the continued existence of election futures markets.
