AMERICANS LOVE a flutter(小额赌博). Trading volumes on Kalshi and Polymarket, their favourite peer-to-peer bookies, surpassed $50bn last year, up from $16bn the year before. Most of the bets concern sports. But punter(赌徒；下注者)s also place wager(赌注；下注)s on everything from actual weather to the political climate and, to economists’ delight, economic conditions. Bets on things like official GDP growth, payrolls and inflation still account for just 1-2% of trading on the two platforms. However, they are now large enough to attract one giant whale—the Federal Reserve.
美国人喜欢小赌一把。Kalshi和Polymarket是他们最喜爱的点对点博彩平台，去年的交易量从上一年的160亿美元飙升至500多亿美元。投注大多与体育有关。但赌徒们也会对从实际天气到政治气候的一切下注，并且令经济学家高兴的是，还包括经济状况。对官方GDP增长、就业和通胀等指标的押注目前仅占两个平台交易量的1-2%。不过，这些押注现在已足够庞大，足以吸引一条巨鲸——美联储。
To be sure, the Fed is not playing the odds(赌概率；赌博) itself. It is, though, beginning to pay close attention to those being played by others. In a recent paper Anthony Diercks of the Fed and two colleagues assessed whether Kalshi could complement(补充；补足) the sundry data, from surveys, financial markets, internal economic models and so on, already at the central bank’s disposal. They conclude that for the Fed, prediction markets look like a dead cert(稳操胜券的事).
当然，美联储自己并没有参与赌博。不过，它开始密切关注别人参与的那些赌博。在最近的一篇论文中，美联储的安东尼·迪克斯和两位同事评估了Kalshi能否补充央行已掌握的各种数据——来自调查、金融市场、内部经济模型等。他们的结论是：对美联储而言，预测市场看起来稳赢。
The authors start out by examining the accuracy of Kalshi predictions. They find that the prediction market outperform(表现优于)s conventional instruments such as futures and options contracts at forecasting where the Fed’s benchmark interest rate will land in a given month. Kalshi odds frequently offered a more accurate range of plausible(看似合理的) outcomes than those instruments.
作者首先考察了Kalshi预测的准确性。他们发现，在预测美联储基准利率某个月份将达到什么水平方面，这个预测市场优于期货和期权合约等传统工具。Kalshi给出的赔率往往比这些工具提供更准确的可能结果区间。
Chance beancounters
机会统计员