Linked to this Kalshi question:
If there are more than 250000 federal employees no longer working relative to the January 2025 employee count before Jan 2026, then the market resolves to Yes. Outcome verified from FRED.
Note the resolution criteria—what matters is the change in the count of federal employees, not whether we can confirm Trump and/or Elon directly fired them. For reference, the specific chart Kalshi links to appears to be this one.
1,000People are also trading
Whooo very glad I sold at 7%. >2300 profit betting no.
New question... Will these numbers end up being revised? I don't trust this administration to release accurate nunbers, only numbers that say what they want them to say. Too many instances of pressure from the top to "find" the "right" numbers...
@SeekingEternity I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that these numbers are inaccurate. The drop from Sep to Oct was entirely explainable by the DRP numbers reported in ~April
@bens Oh, if I were to bet on it, I'd say that they probably will be revised a little bit but not dramatically, the same way the prior update to the chart was vs. the update before that. Not likely to affect the resolution. And if the numbers weren't in line with the story Trump is spinning then maybe they'd just not have gotten released, rather than being fudged. But it's hard to miss the degree to which this admin is willing to lie for the sake of their spin, and I wouldn't be surprised if the numbers end up changing somewhat more dramatically (or if the official numbers don't change but somebody leaks that they "changed the methodology" or something, to get the result).
@bens there’s every reason to believe the numbers may be inaccurate. They were already revised retroactively last month, we know the administration wants the jobs numbers to look a certain way, and its bookkeeping is generally atrocious.
@skibidist Just because he succeeded in touring a bunch of people doesn't mean that wasn't a horrendous idea
@SimonWestlake no but in this case we'd more likely need to blame the people accepting the quitting bonus because nearly like 150,000+ people could've just said 'no' and continued their gainful employment
@bens Well played! I'm confused though, what happened that the market was missing?
I haven't watched this very much, but I see more news lately about government employees being hired back than fired.
@TimothyJohnson5c16 the market was missing that the DRP buyout ppl only “counted” on the statistics starting with the October numbers, which were only released today. There was uncertainty over how many there would be but the “official” value was always going to be just enough to get this over 250k, which it was. I was foolish for being too-risk averse to bet even more than I already did on this, because I assumed someone knew even more than I did (on real money markets). I guess they didn’t.