The Financial Times reported on Monday morning that roughly 6,200 oil futures contracts changed hands in the span of sixty second. Fifteen minutes later, Donald Trump posted on Truth Social that the United States had held “productive conversations” with Tehran. Oil prices tumbled and equity futures surged. And somebody, somewhere, had just made an extraordinary amount of money.

The notional value of those trades was $580 million. The timing was, to borrow the careful language of one hedge fund manager with 25 years of market experience, “really abnormal”.¹

That is, of course, one way to put it. But it is worth to question how much of a mystery this actually is. The circle of people with foreknowledge of such a relevant post by Trump’s own account on his own platform is remarkably small.

When combining that with the financial sophistication to convert it into leveraged oil futures positions within a fifteen-minute window, with such amounts, the circle becomes extraordinarily small.

It is clear that this was not a retail trader acting on instinct. The profile points toward someone living at the precise intersection of political proximity to presidency and serious financial power.

Additionally, this is not an isolated incident, which is the part the mystery framing tends to obscure.

For months now, suspiciously well-timed positions have preceded official U.S. government announcements with a consistency that mere probability can’t comfortably explain. On Polymarket’s platform, large and highly profitable bets landed ahead of American military strikes in Venezuela.² Most alarming of all, the operations were carried out through newly created accounts with no previous activity on record.

The Regulators and the Regulated

Understanding why nothing will happen requires to look at the recent history of the organisations nominally responsible for making something happen. The Securities and Exchange Commission exists, in theory, precisely to investigate this kind of trading pattern.

Insider trading on material non-public information is not a legal grey area. The investigative tools exist, and there is plenty of legal precedent when it comes to politicians. What does not exist is any realistic prospect that the current SEC will appropriately investigate the people connected to the administration that oversees it.

The current SEC chair, Paul Atkins, is a deregulation advocate and former Wall Street consultant, confirmed by the Senate in April 2025.

As SEC Commissioner in the years running up to the 2008 financial crisis, he consistently voted to deregulate investment banks and dismissed concerns about systemic risk. Days after Bear Stearns collapsed, he mocked those calling for stronger oversight, claiming they were wallowing in “irrational pessimism”.³ Weeks before the full crash, he was still insisting that what happened on Wall Street did not necessarily translate to Main Street.⁴

Ultimately, both the SEC’s own Inspector General and the bipartisan Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission later concluded that the SEC’s deregulation contributed directly to the crash.

The consequences of the crisis are well known. Millions lost their homes and unemployment took a decade to recover. Ninety percent of Americans were poorer in 2016 than they had been in 2007. In other countries, recovery from the crash lasted even longer, if it happened at all.

Asked at his 2025 confirmation hearing whether he had been wrong, Atkins said he did not believe so.⁵

He then spent fifteen years after the crisis charging financial firms $1,200 an hour at his consulting firm Patomak for advice on how to manage the SEC.

Also during his confirmation hearing, he refused to disclose who would buy his firm, ensuring no one could determine whether the buyer was simply purchasing proximity to the future chair of the agency they needed to influence.

This is the person standing between Monday’s oil trades and any consequence whatsoever.

The more instructive parallel to the SEC’s inertia is the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein files, a case that revealed something important about how accountability actually functions at the highest levels of power.

The files existed and the connections were documented. Names appeared, powerful ones, and the evidentiary trail pointed toward a network involving people with enormous political influence.

Predictably, the DOJ sat on it and still denies pursuing an investigation. Apart from Ghislaine Maxwell, nobody was prosecuted and convicted.

The files were eventually released due to public pressure, although highly redacted and incomplete. Meanwhile, as the war with Iran unfolds, files are being deleted from the department’s platform, among them documents that implicate Trump directly.

The mechanism at work in both cases is identical. The law stops functioning as a constraint on behaviour. It becomes instead a performance of constraint, maintained carefully enough to preserve legitimacy while delivering none of its substance.

The Dealer’s Mood

It is worth explaining something more philosophically disturbing about what the stock market has actually become.

Markets, from a Hayekian standpoint, are supposed to function as mechanisms for pricing reality.⁶ However, a genuinely laissez-faire structure has never existed, nor is it really the point of neoliberalism, yet the belief that markets represent the most reliable tool for determining and accurately pricing value remains a central argument of the framework. The underlying assumption is essentially that price signals in the markets are supposed to reflect something true about the world.

However, what is happening now shows that current price signals are completely detached from the underlying reality and begun reflecting something else entirely.

Think of the market as a crowd watching a poker game. Traditionally, the crowd bets based on the cards on the table, the visible hands, the probabilities.

What happens now is that a small group of players have started betting not on the cards, but on how the crowd will react to whatever the dealer says next, regardless of whether the dealer is telling the truth.

The cards become something marginal, and the dealer’s mood is the variable that matters. And if you happen to know what the dealer is about to say fifteen minutes before he says it, you’ll win big.

When markets surged on Trump’s Truth Social post about “productive conversations” with Tehran, they were not reacting to a genuine assessment that the Iran war was ending.

The Iranian parliament speaker denied any negotiations had taken place within hours of the post, but it did not matter. The move had already happened. The post had already been traded on. Whether the underlying claim was true was almost beside the point.

This is a self-reinforcing delusion, and it runs deeper than any single episode. Consider what happened last year. Trump announced blanket tariffs on every country on earth, an act of economic aggression with no coherent strategic rationale. Seven trillion dollars in market value evaporated.

Then he walked portions of it back, partially, and markets responded as though something extraordinary had been restored. The baseline destruction was simply absorbed and renormalised, and the markets did not accurately price the reality, which was that tariffs remained substantially elevated and global trade relationships had been permanently disrupted.

It priced the relief of a partial retreat, because that was what participants expected other participants to price.

Trump has understood this intuitively across both terms. He breaks things entirely, retreats partially, and allows the retreat to be experienced as a salvation. The cycle generates enormous wealth transfers at each inflection point, flowing consistently toward whoever knew the retreat was coming.

Moral Hazard

The bet was not on oil, but on whether enough people would stop killing each other to move a price. That in itself is a problem. Since the beginning of civilisation wars have always moved markets. But there is a difference between a market that responds to war and a market that rewards people feeding on it.

This is what happens when you don’t learn from the 2000s and keep insisting on a financial system with no moral incentives whatsoever, only to hand it to the people that have spent their entire careers making sure it stayed that way.

Moral hazard, in its original financial sense, describes what happens when someone is insulated from the consequences of their own risk-taking. The economists who coined the term were concerned with relatively contained failures, a bank taking excessive risks, an insurer incorrectly pricing exposure. The concept was never originally meant to describe a government. And yet, here we are.

References

1. https://www.ft.com/content/1171d623-3709-4f6e-8ded-a5df4ec57696?syn-25a6b1a6=1
2. https://www.ft.com/content/2883d3d4-aea2-4984-b994-4640593eed55?syn-25a6b1a6=1
3. https://www.sec.gov/news/speech/2008/spch031708psa.htm
4. https://www.regcompliancewatch.com/sec-chair-nominee-a-peek-at-the-views-of-paul-atkins/
5. https://www.banking.senate.gov/newsroom/minority/warren-grills-sec-nominee-on-failed-judgement-before-2008-crisis-simple-question-mr-atkins-were-you-wrong
6. https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/speech/quarles20191101a.htm