On a recent episode of What Next<\/a>, host Mary Harris spoke to Krugman about how people are making a killing off the war in Iran. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n Mary Harris: I want to focus on what happened with the Iran situation and the oil futures<\/a>. How does someone make money on a trade like this? We see a lot of activity right before an announcement is made. What happens then that results in me getting a bunch of cash, theoretically?\u00a0<\/p>\n Paul Krugman: You could sell a bunch of oil futures at 6:30 in the morning at, let\u2019s say, $98 a barrel, and, actually, you could even sell oil futures you don\u2019t have. You could basically just borrow them and then buy them back at 7:07, after Trump has made his announcement, for $90 a barrel. So you\u2019re ahead. You\u2019ve sold stuff at $98 and you bought it back at $90. The actual amount of money you make is not the entire volume of the trade. But it\u2019s a lot of money. You\u2019re basically arbitraging between the price just before and the price just after.<\/p>\n Do we have a sense of how much money some person or persons made here?\u00a0<\/p>\n I have not actually run the numbers, but if we say there was something like a 10 percent movement in oil prices, and there was $580 million of transaction volume, then somebody collected 10 percent of that. So let\u2019s say it was $58 million.<\/p>\n How would we know the identities of these traders? It seems like that is something that is knowable. Does that just rely on a completely different administration, a completely different Securities and Exchange Commission? What would be the typical play here if we were in a normal world?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t do financial investigations, but I\u2019m pretty sure that at some level, these orders have to have been placed with somebody. They might have been anonymized, but I\u2019m pretty sure that if you did an investigation with subpoena power to require the financial institutions that have to act as brokers to reveal information, there would be a pretty clear trail pointing to it. But of course, we don\u2019t know that. Ordinarily, these things are not public knowledge. That\u2019s how financial markets work in many cases.<\/p>\n Could the trail dry up? I understand that maybe something won\u2019t be investigated now, but I just wonder if time means that the investigation becomes less possible?<\/p>\n It\u2019s possible. The people who placed these trades almost certainly have to reckon with the possibility that they could be tracked, that eventually they would be found out, and they\u2019re just operating on the presumption that they will never be held accountable. Maybe they think that we are effectively a one-party nation now, or they just think by the time it has passed there will be enough people to protect them, but it\u2019s pretty amazing. If somebody suggested to me, \u201cLook here, you can make a million dollars by using this deeply classified national security information, and, trust us, you\u2019ll never be found out,\u201d I would not do it. Leaving patriotism and morality aside, I would say, \u201cGee, I don\u2019t trust that.\u201d But somebody obviously did.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n Ian Prasad Philbrick <\/a><\/p>\n Can you lay out your case for this being more than insider trading? You did it really well in your Substack<\/a>.\u00a0<\/p>\n Insider trading of this kind would be illegal. If you were a corporate insider who knew stuff about XYZ corporation\u2019s finances and traded on that basis, that would be illegal too. But in this case, there are three things. First, the nature of the information. There is hardly anything that is more sensitive and protected. That\u2019s more than knowing that there\u2019s some unrealized losses on a corporate balance sheet.<\/p>\n Do you really think that foreign governments are, at this point, with a magnifying glass, looking at our markets and thinking that something might be about to happen?<\/p>\n Of course they are! That\u2019s the easiest thing. It doesn\u2019t require any deep undercover operations. Put it this way: The fact that financial media was on this almost immediately\u2014if CNBC and the Financial Times are watching these things, how can you imagine that the Russians and the Saudis and the Chinese aren\u2019t watching it? The second thing is that this does reveal information.<\/p>\n But it\u2019s not specific, right? It\u2019s not specific. It\u2019s inoperational information, right?\u00a0<\/p>\n It\u2019s pretty close to! If there\u2019s suddenly a large transaction and we\u2019re in the middle of a war with Iran and the transaction is somebody betting that things will look less dire, then this is clearly signaling that Trump is going to de-escalate in a few minutes, right? And specifically that he was going to offer a four-day window, or something about nonbombing.<\/p>\n You\u2019re really making the case there that this actually is maybe the most reliable signal you would get?<\/p>\n Yeah. Trump having announced that he\u2019s engaged in productive negotiations with the Iranian government, there\u2019s no reliability about his pronouncements about what\u2019s happening. But if you see what looks like an insider making a large financial transaction, that carries much more weight than a simple statement.<\/p>\n Because you\u2019re putting your money on the line.\u00a0<\/p>\n The third was a little bit less conclusive, but as I see it, the morality, the general nature of essentially trading on or selling national secrets through financial transactions is not really different from just plain selling the national secrets. Somebody is willing to place a $500 million bet in the futures market on the basis of national security. How different is that from just plain selling that information to a foreign power? Or a domestic power!<\/p>\n It shows what you value. You value making money off it.\u00a0<\/p>\n Yeah, and for what it\u2019s worth, this is pure speculation, but my guess is this was not actually somebody close to the White House directly making the trade. This was somebody close to the White House selling the information to some large financial operator to make the trade.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Last Week\u2019s Landmark Verdicts Against Big Tech Have a Surprise Ally at the Supreme Court <\/p>\n Economist Paul Krugman Has a Dark Theory About the Iran War![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/640e4746-894f-45b1-bc74-bf52b1e0841e.jpeg\")
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