Wouldn't this also open up to foreign influence dumping money and misinformation to promote negative policy decisions.
Or not even foreign influence. It's just rephrasing money = speech. Instead of spending millions to influence voters, you spend millions on positions, and you get your money back if you don't win your side? So it lets the megacorps/trade groups get richer by removing the uncertainty of lobbying in place of buying policy once you hit a certain critical threshold of money to throw around.
Yes, plausibly. Maybe you could limit this by requiring bets to be made by individual citizens (in the case of government policy markets) or by shareholders (in the case of a corporate market) or something.
There are still avenues for corruption, but it's not clear to me that they are worse than the present state. There is of course always the chance that those attempting to manipulate the market will lose their shirts.
Or not even foreign influence. It's just rephrasing money = speech. Instead of spending millions to influence voters, you spend millions on positions, and you get your money back if you don't win your side? So it lets the megacorps/trade groups get richer by removing the uncertainty of lobbying in place of buying policy once you hit a certain critical threshold of money to throw around.