Last weekend, Donald Trump threatened to “obliterate” Iran’s power plants if the Tehran regime didn’t open the Strait of Hormuz. Oil prices, which were already elevated, rose further. On Monday, March 23rd, at 6:49 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, there was a sudden surge of trading in the futures markets, which operate around the clock. According to the Financial Times, roughly six thousand oil-trading contracts, worth more than half a billion dollars, changed hands. Just after, there was a surge of activity in contracts tied to the S. & P. 500 stock index, which had been on a downward trend since the war began.

The spikes in volume didn’t indicate whether the trades were buy or sell orders, but based on how prices moved as they were placed other traders quickly deduced that someone was selling oil futures, a bet on the value of the commodity falling, and buying stock futures, a bet on a market rebound. Then, shortly after 7 A.M., the President announced on his social-media account that the United States and Tehran were engaged in talks about a “COMPLETE AND TOTAL RESOLUTION OF OUR HOSTILITIES IN THE MIDDLE EAST.” Trump said that he had instructed the Pentagon to postpone any strikes for five days. The market’s reaction was immediate. The price of crude plunged by more than ten per cent. Stock futures jumped about 2.5 per cent.

Whoever sold oil futures and bought stock futures had made a lot of money in a short time. Was this just a fortuitous set of trades? Or was it insider trading by someone, or a group of people, or an institution, that had been alerted in advance to Trump’s reversal? “The question is always: What are the odds they just happened to trade at the right time and got lucky?” Ben Schiffrin, a former attorney at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which investigates insider trading in stocks, told me. “Granted the timing of the trades and the sizes of the positions, it certainly raises the question.”

There is no evidence about who placed the timely bets—at least, not yet. But some of Trump’s political opponents quickly cried foul anyway. “Who was it? Trump? A family member? A White House staffer? This is corruption. Mind blowing corruption,” the Democratic senator Chris Murphy wrote on X. The White House, for its part, pointed out that federal employees are barred from profiting from nonpublic information, and added, “Any implication that Administration officials are engaged in such activity without evidence is baseless and irresponsible reporting.”

Since the war began, trading in the futures markets has been heavy and, sometimes, frenetic. In terms of their absolute size, the trades that took place immediately before Trump’s announcement last Monday weren’t off the charts. But the volume of trading was unusually large for the time of day: according to data collected and analyzed by Bloomberg, it was roughly nine times the average volume at the same time during the previous five days. The sudden surge in trading of stock futures was also unusual: until Trump’s post, there had been no big news. “The timing and the fact that the two trades were placed at the same time, it kind of smells like something was off,” Mike Khouw, a veteran futures trader and portfolio manager who used to run a derivatives desk at Cantor Fitzgerald, a Wall Street investment bank, told me.

In futures markets, trades are often placed on margin through a brokerage account. Some of these trades were so large, Khouw said, that whoever placed them would have needed tens of millions of dollars in margin reserves, indicating a considerable level of financial sophistication and wealth. “You are not dealing with a rube,” Khouw said. “You are not dealing with someone whose other occupation is working at Starbucks.” The wagers could also have been placed by an institutional trader with ample financial reserves. It’s at least conceivable that a hedge fund read the publicly available runes, concluded that Trump would back down before his forty-eight-hour deadline expired, and decided to establish a short position in oil and a long position in stocks before U.S. markets opened for the new week. Computer-driven algorithmic trading is also common in the futures markets, and it could have played a role here. The fact that the trades came so close to Trump’s announcement may have been mere happenstance, Khouw pointed out. But, given that coincidence of timing and the corruption endemic to the Trump Administration, it also seems conceivable that someone, or some entity, got tipped off and cashed in.

It wouldn’t be the first time in recent history that anonymous traders have made bank based on their uncanny ability to predict Presidential announcements or actions. The day before the war began, six accounts on Polymarket, the online prediction site, wagered that the U.S. would strike Iran within forty-eight hours, netting profits of more than a million dollars. In January, another Polymarket account won big by betting that Nicolás Maduro, the President of Venezuela, would soon be out of power. (On January 3rd, a U.S. raid captured him and his wife.) But it would be tough to identify who made these wagers: it takes a lot of people to launch a military raid, so the circle of advance knowledge was surely large, and bets on Polymarket are funded by anonymous cryptocurrency accounts, which are difficult to penetrate.

In this instance, finding out who placed the well-timed trades should be easier—at least in theory. It seems reasonable to assume that the number of people who received prior notice of Trump’s decision to postpone the strikes on power plants was relatively small, and the trades were placed on regulated exchanges. The regulatory agency that has primary responsibility for enforcing the laws in the futures markets is the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (C.F.T.C.). “The thing that should be happening is that the C.F.T.C. should be investigating these trades,” Schiffrin, who is now with Better Markets, a Washington-based public-interest group, said. “They have the authority to subpoena trading records and find the identity of the people who placed the trades. Insider-trading investigations happen all the time, and that’s how they work.”

The C.F.T.C. didn’t respond to a question about whether it had launched an investigation. Despite recent staff cuts, the agency’s enforcement division still has some dedicated professionals. But the C.F.T.C.’s leadership doesn’t inspire much confidence. Its current head, Mike Selig, is a thirty-six-year-old lawyer and crypto booster. Last week, Selig announced the creation of an “innovation task force” centered on three industries in which the Trump family now has business interests. “The C.F.T.C. seems to be more focussed on promoting crypto, prediction markets, and A.I. than its core function: investigating and preventing manipulation in the futures markets,” Schiffrin said.

In investigating insider-trading cases, the C.F.T.C. sometimes coöperates with the Securities and Exchange Commission, which is a much bigger agency, but one that has also run into controversy since Trump returned to office. Its chair, Paul Atkins, is a Trump appointee who also has strong links to the crypto industry, and its five-member board, which makes the ultimate decisions in enforcement cases, currently consists of just Atkins and two more Republican appointees. (The two other seats, traditionally held by appointees of the opposition party, are vacant.) Earlier this month, Margaret Ryan, the director of the S.E.C.’s enforcement division, resigned after just six months in the job. According to Reuters, which cited unnamed sources, “Ryan wanted to be more aggressive in pursuing charges for fraud and other misconduct including in cases that touched the president’s circle, but faced resistance from SEC Chair Paul Atkins and other top Republican political appointees.” Apparently, one of the cases that Ryan wanted to pursue involved Justin Sun, the founder of the crypto firm Binance, and another involved Elon Musk’s tardy disclosures, in 2022, of purchases of shares in Twitter, which he later acquired.

According to Reuters, a spokesperson for the S.E.C. said that the agency made enforcement decisions “based on facts, the law, and policy, not on politics.” Still, a number of observers have pointed to a drop-off in the number of enforcement actions taken by both the S.E.C. and the C.F.T.C. In a speech earlier this month, Elizabeth Warren, who is the ranking minority member of the Senate Banking Committee, said that under Atkins the S.E.C. has filed three hundred enforcement cases, compared with twenty-seven hundred under his predecessor, Gary Gensler, who was a Biden appointee. “But the problem isn’t simply a feckless S.E.C. chair,” Warren went on. “The problem is a tsunami of corruption that is sweeping through Washington—a tsunami whipped up by the President of the United States.”

Warren noted more than a dozen examples, including the favorable regulatory treatment that corporations such as Paramount and Live Nation received after making financial donations to Trump causes; the loosening of national-security restrictions on the United Arab Emirates following an Emirati investment of nearly half a billion dollars in World Liberty Financial, a Trump family crypto venture; and the lucrative Pentagon contracts awarded to businesses connected to 1789 Capital, a venture-capital firm in which Donald Trump, Jr., is a partner. “Can anyone be confident that our markets are fair and honest when all you need to do is bribe the President or cut his family in on the action in order to tilt the playing field in your direction?” Warren said to her audience, which consisted largely of institutional investors.

The senator, a longtime promoter of stricter regulation, was speaking a week before the profitable oil trades that preceded Trump’s postponement of strikes in Iran. Regardless of their origin, the answer to Warren’s question about the markets in Trump’s America should be obvious. The regulatory agencies are following Trump’s agenda. The Justice Department, which is ultimately responsible for bringing criminal cases of insider trading, is acting, all too often, as an arm of the White House. And the Republicans who control Congress are ignoring all the grift while fawning over Trump and giving him hastily concocted awards. As Warren also pointed out, this reality should alarm the biggest players in the financial system, not to mention the rest of us. ♦