Even if official Washington isn’t saying anything, futures traders are jumping in with both feet. According to John Delaney, the chief executive of Intrade, an online futures-trading market, the latest contracts betting has Gonzales much more likely to step down than Wolfowitz. “Currently we’d give Wolfowitz a 42 percent probability of being gone by the end of June,” says Delaney. By contrast, the figure for Gonzales is a 55 percent probability, he says. Those odds have increased in the last week from 50 percent for Gonzales and 30 percent for Wolfowitz. Delaney said it was not clear how the markets arrived at those numbers, but he said traders were phenomenally prescient in divining such things. “In the days before Rumsfeld resigned, our markets moved up by 15 points, even before there was any news. They also went up on Saddam in the hours before he was captured,” Delaney said. “I don’t know why. The market is much smarter than I am.” Place your bets, folks. But get odds.
