MarketWatch reports President Trump’s truthiness makes history as betting site pays out big.
Before the president’s address on border security Tuesday night, Bookmaker.eu put the over/under on the number of lies he’d spew at 3.5. For bettors, it was a no-brainer, as hundreds of thousands of dollars loaded up on the over.
In fact, Bookmaker odds consultant John Lester told MarketWatch that the site has never seen such a lopsided response from its customers.
“Never in our 30-year history have we been this one-sided (9 to 1) on a wager,” he said. “You would have to go back to the early Mike Tyson fights (pre-Buster Douglas) to find a wager with comparable one-sided demand.”
Lester explained that no matter how much he adjusted the odds, hardly anybody seemed interested in taking the under. Smart move, considering the Washington Post found that there were at least six false statements during the address.
“We knew the President would be prone to exaggeration to support his need for Democratic support to fund his wall,” Lester said. “However, we hoped the 8-minute time constraint coupled with the unlikelihood of the President going off-script would keep the total number of false statements low.”
Nope
I explained in my post ahead of the speech that bookies seldom lose because they do not care which way people bet. That’s true, assuming the bet attracts an equal dollar amount of bets on each side.
See How Many Lies Will Trump Tell Tonight in His Special Address? Bookies Take Bets for discussion.
In this case, BookMaker made an error. It did not place the over-under line at a spot that generated equal bets. Six or 7 might have done that.
This was a bookie error and betters realized it. Congrats to those betting on lies.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
I’d have gone with 5 lies at least, bad odds maker there…
Two points:
Why the hell aren’t we amping up e-Verify? The Republicans have had 2 years to make it expensive and unappealing (from a prison time perspective) to hire illegal aliens. But they have done nothing – they didn’t even fund the damn wall. Now suddenly it is a crisis?
Trump: “Who’se gonna pay for the wall?”
Trump Supporters: ???
This is something I’ve noted to my sister several years ago (she employs Mexican workers in her business). Virtually all countries haven’t had the same illegal alien problem the States has experienced for decades (the current illegal migration problem in Europe being a recent phenomenon) because they all enforce on the employer side of the problem – and local businesses can’t run away. But the U.S. agricultural sector is based on cheap, illegal workers. Without them American agriculture collapses, at least without major structural reform. Arizona did a trial project prosecuting employers using illegal workers directly and it was wildly successful, that is until political pressure shut it down. See also the War on Drugs/CIA, Operation Fast and Furious, Syria and the American support for ISIS, etc., etc. The list goes on and on. As George Carlin said, “It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”
In the 1990s, the INS started a new program that was successfully ridding the meatpacking industry of illegal immigrants. But then a former governor-turned-lobbyist went to Capitol Hill and put an end to the program.
To the user “themonosynaptic” above, you cannot solely blame Trump or the Republicans for not making e-verify mandatory. Big biz doesn’t want it, and both parties are in the pocket of big biz.
In addition, the Democrats are aware that 80% of immigrants vote Democratic. So, they are motived by both the corporate lobbyists as well as their party’s self-interest to keep immigration high, particularly the “tire, poor, and huddled masses” who would be dependent on welfare.
I don’t think the Democrats would support mandatory e-verify even with a big amnesty. For one thing, they don’t want to give Trump any win, and so they will fillibuster in the Senate. And another thing, they want to keep immigration flowing. Also, there seems to be be a hardening of anti-border ideology among the Democrats.
Our federal and state governments are broken. Our media is broken. Is it just the winter time darkening my mood or is the darkness of a long winter descending upon us?
“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
When off script Trump is pretty much a lie machine gun. Even when given a script to read he manages a few lies.
A lot of people here have IDS, Immigrant Derangement Syndrome.
IDS perfectly summarized. Thank you.
You mean IIDS (illegal)? I am totally for legal immigration. You are obviously for illegal immigration.
Is that why Trump is restricting legal immigration? More lies
Are you talking about the bogus H1B visa applicants? We can never issue enough visas to meet fraudulent demand. Ask Google/Apple/Microsoft about the misuse by Indian IT shops.
H1B visa abuse is rampant and tech companies use H1B’s to push wages lower and thereby increase their stock prices and executive compensation.
Americans are fired and Indian H1B’s are brought to replace them and even those Americans working earn less due to companies affording to pay less to them since there is the threat of replacing them with H1B’s.
The current wage levels for H1B’s are too low.
The minimum wage for H1B’s should be increased to 250,000 dollars per year to leave 99% of IT and tech jobs to Americans.
how can you leave those jobs for americans if college is unaffordable?
1.
Make College affordable by making student loans again dischargeable in a bankruptcy so lenders loan less money and colleges have to charge less to get students.
The Bush era law that made student loans non-dischargeable in bankruptcy led to colleges increasing their prices since students could pay much more since lenders were willing to loan them much more money.
2.
Have programming courses already in high school.
3.
Employ those programmers who are currently unemployed
k-12 in the U.S is extremely broken. they need to reform how they teach and get rid of all the useless crap
No, we have WSS–wage suppression syndrome:
If they paid out they are the suckers. All of the so-called lies were Trumped-up garbage by the writer, which I could have predicted before wasting my time reading.
I found one lie by Trump in his speech:
Trump claimed that “1 in 3 women are sexually assaulted on the dangerous trek up through Mexico”
This is a LIE.
In reality 60%-80% of the women are raped according to Amnesty International:
“According to Amnesty International, 60% of migrant women and girls are raped while migrating, while other data indicate that 80% of women experience rape and sexual assault during the migration process.”
So the situation is MUCH WORSE than Trump stated.
Then one has to think WHO is raping these women.
Most likely it is the MEN in the Caravans traveling to USA together with the women and crossing the open border and coming to USA.
So I guess Bookmaker used the Washington Post fact checkers as the arbiter of the wager. They found six, but if you take out the ones that are true but misleading he’s down to 3.
Trump in his speech also proposed funding for machines to better check more cars crossing the ports of entry to find the drugs coming through ports of entry.
There is a CRISIS at the border.
“December saw the most families caught at the U.S.-Mexico border ever, with nearly 32,000 family members apprehended.
According to Department of Homeland Security data released Wednesday, 31,901 of the 60,782 migrants from Central America who were apprehended by Border Patrol agents stationed at the U.S.-Mexico border or turned away by Customs and Border Protection officers at official crossing points were families.
That is the highest number of families to ever attempt migrating, both legally and illegally, into the U.S. in one month, according to federal data.”
So 60k+ illegals in just 1 month and 30k+ of them were in family units which is an ALL TIME RECORD.
Does the bookie know the number of lies told by Christine Ford in the Kavanaugh hearing, even after it has taken place? I’m sure Washington Post will confirm that Ford told no lies.
How about bets on global warming?
This is another anit-American piece.
What exactly constitutes anti-Americanism? Based on how people throw the term around, it doesn’t seem to affect those who deliberately lower American living standards, those who wage endless war for cynical reasons, or those who bend over backwards for Israel or Saudi Arabia at the expense of the US. It’s an odd accusation used by unthinking people.
It’s also interesting to note that many other countries do not have an equivalent term. Maybe they should adopt one, since it seems to work so well for propaganda purposes.
What are the purposes of such ‘bets’ other than dividing the country? You can find someone at Washington Post who will find a dozen lies by Trump. Likewise, I can find someone at Breitbart who will find another dozen lies by Pelosi.
You may view Ford as a patriot. But I see her as anti-American.
So what is your point?
I didn’t say anything about Ford. Maybe anti-Americanism should include people who play the red/blue game against all reason, since the two parties clearly don’t have the interests of regular Americans in mind. It would make a lot more sense than the current definition people use.
Or the point could be that it’s just a really dumb term devoid of meaning.
I don’t really care about red vs blue game. We have a crisis at the border when caravans after caravans arrive every few weeks. What are we going to do about it? If the blue team wants to take in the caravans, it needs to explicitly state so rather than playing us for fools. We need to have controlled legal immigration via legislation. Even Obama’s border patrol chief (who lost his job when Trump took office) went on TV to support the wall to stop illegal migrant flow.
Democrats and Republicans (before Trump) DELIBERATELY lowered Americans living standards by allowing illegal immigration of tens of millions of illegal immigrants.
This illegal immigration is a large part of why wages have stagnated since 1970’s among American working class and lower middle-class.
Illegal immigration lowers wages and illegal immigrants steal jobs from Americans by working more cheaply.
Illegal immigrants also steal from every American who needs to use healthcare since healthcare costs are higher because hospitals have to charge more from Americans to pay for the free care they provide to illegals.
Since healthcare costs more this causes health insurance to be more expensive.
Illegal immigrants also steal from Americans by having their illegal immigrant kids or birthright citizenship getting kids causing massive costs in American schools which all real estate owners pay in their property taxes and renters also pay those higher property taxes in their rents since when property taxes rise the owner hikes the rent.
Illegal immigration is unsustainable and needs to be stopped.
At least Fox News Shephard Smith LIED in his factcheck on Trump by claiming:
“”government statistics show that there is less violent crime by the undocumented immigrant population than the general population”
There are NO such government statistics even being collected and separated since there is NO government stats on the amount of crimes illegal immigrants make available from government.
One can only piece the stats together partially from many places but government does NOT do it.
Here is Fox News own article from 2015 that exposes Shephard Smith’s LYING factcheck:
“The federal government can tell you how many “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islanders” stole a car, the precise number of “American Indian or Alaska Natives” who were arrested for vagrancy or how many whites were busted for counterfeiting in any given year. But the government agencies that crunch crime numbers are utterly unable — or unwilling — to pinpoint for the public how many illegal immigrants are arrested within U.S. borders each year.”
AND
“In the absence of comprehensive data, FoxNews examined a patchwork of local, state and federal statistics that revealed a wildly disproportionate number of murderers, rapists and drug dealers are crossing into the U.S. amid the wave of hard-working families seeking a better life. The explosive figures show illegal immigrants are three times as likely to be convicted of murder as members of the general population and account for far more crimes than their 3.5-percent share of the U.S. population would suggest.”
AND
” illegal immigrants in the U.S. account for 13.6 percent of all offenders sentenced for crimes committed in the U.S. Twelve percent of murder sentences, 20 percent of kidnapping sentences and 16 percent of drug trafficking sentences are meted out to illegal immigrants.”
The whole article:
So if the bookie PAID based on Media’s factchecks they were most likely just ROBBED by the incompetent factchecks since even Fox News Shephard Smith flat out LIED in his factcheck of Trump’s speech and used his LYING factcheck to claim that Trump had lied.
Here is Fox News Shephard Smith’s FAKE and LYING factcheck:
He lies right at the start and nobody challenged him and everyone repeated it as gospel that Trump had lied when in reality Fox News and Shephard Smith LIED in their factcheck.
Shep Smith must have some pretty good pictures somewhere – the whole point of Fox News is to feed happy propaganda to their audience (just like CNN do to theirs). Shep is rocking the boat. However, he is using facts when he calls out Trump on the criminality of convicted illegal aliens – they are under-represented as a class in our prisons for violent crime (see earlier attachment).
Nice try, but, then, FoxNews fact checking itself 4 years in advance is a bit desperate, plus the 2015 article isn’t exactly accurate:
“Politifact” is yet another partisan only so-called “fact checker”. It cannot possibly be used to buttress any claims reliably.
I watched that line for awhile, and though the number of lies at 3.5 did not change, by the end you had to bet $5 to win $1 on the over. So it’s probably not as bad as it seems on the surface.
Is this where all the old white men gather and cry bitter tears seeing minorities and women rise to power? Here in the bunker with Adolf Trump and Eva Braun.
“Mish, in case you haven’t noticed, Escierto is putting you at the same level as Hitler too.”
Running off to tell teacher?
If Pelosi’s head was invaded by bees, they could build a hive in her head and she’d never notice.