The forecast Asia is missing

In February 2026, a central bank quietly graded the crowd. Three economists — one at the Federal Reserve Board, writing with Jonathan Wright, one of the deans of macroeconomic forecasting — published a study that took the prediction-market exchange Kalshi and put its odds on inflation, jobs, growth, and interest rates side by side with the tools the profession actually relies on: the big forecaster surveys and the interest-rate futures market.¹ The question was blunt. When real people bet real money on the next CPI print or the next Fed decision, is the resulting price any good?

The answer was yes — and in places, better than good. Across the variables they tested, Kalshi's market-implied forecasts matched the best professional surveys, and for the federal funds rate they were more accurate than the futures market that has priced Fed policy for decades. A regulator's research arm, in other words, found that a market built partly on Robinhood retail flow could hold its own against Wall Street's forecasting machine.

That is a remarkable finding on its own terms. But I read it from Hanoi, and the first thing I thought was not about the Fed. It was: none of this exists for us. The instruments the paper validates — liquid, real-time, market-based forecasts of the macroeconomy — are everywhere in the United States and almost nowhere in emerging Asia. Which is exactly why the result matters more here than there.

What the Fed actually measured

Start with the problem the paper is trying to solve. Policymakers and businesses need to know what's coming — the next inflation reading, whether the central bank cuts, where growth is heading. The standard tools all have holes. Surveys (the Bloomberg consensus, the Survey of Professional Forecasters, the New York Fed's Survey of Market Expectations) are accurate on average but slow: they're snapshots taken every few weeks, usually a single point estimate with no sense of the odds around it. Financial derivatives update instantly but are limited — they exist for a handful of variables, and even there they can be thin or hard to interpret.¹

Kalshi is a third thing. It is the largest CFTC-regulated prediction market in the United States, licensed as a Designated Contract Market — the same regulatory category as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange — with market-making from firms like Susquehanna and retail access through Robinhood and Webull. It runs live markets on a long list of macro releases: CPI and core CPI, PCE inflation, the unemployment rate, payrolls, GDP, the odds of recession, and the federal funds rate meeting by meeting.² Several of those are variables for which no financial market forecast existed at all before this.

100M

Contracts on a single FOMC rate market — this is liquid³

$7M

Max position per market — room for institutional size²

13

Macro series priced live — CPI, jobs, GDP, the Fed²

The mechanic is the same one that runs through everything we write: each contract is a simple bet that pays $1 if an outcome happens and nothing if it doesn't, so its price is the market's probability — a price is a probability. The paper's quiet contribution is turning a whole row of these contracts into a full distribution. If the contract for "rate above 4.00%" trades at 40¢ and "above 4.25%" trades at 22¢, then the market is assigning 18% to the rate landing in between:

Walk that across every strike and you have a complete, model-free probability distribution for next month's number — rebuilt every day, from trades.⁸ No econometric model, no assumptions about the shape. Just prices.

The scoreboard — it matched the pros, and beat the futures

Here is the part that should make a forecaster sit up. The authors compared Kalshi's forecasts to the benchmarks on the day the number actually came out, and tested whether the differences were statistically real.⁴

For the federal funds rate, Kalshi's median and modal forecast had a perfect record — zero average error — on the day of the FOMC meeting, a statistically significant improvement over the federal funds futures market.⁴ Futures have priced Fed policy for forty years; the prediction market beat them. Going further out — 150 days, three meetings ahead — Kalshi was roughly as accurate as the New York Fed's survey of professional forecasters. For headline CPI, Kalshi's error on release day was about 6.3 basis points against the Bloomberg consensus's 8.1 — again a statistically significant edge. On core CPI and unemployment, it was a statistical tie with the best survey on the street. The authors' summary line is the one to remember: in no case was Kalshi significantly worse than the Bloomberg consensus.⁴

The fed-funds result has a clean origin story. At the September 2024 meeting, the odds were split between a quarter-point and a half-point cut. The futures market, which can only really express two outcomes at once, hedged; Kalshi's distribution put more weight on the half-point cut — and that's what happened.⁴ The market wasn't lucky. It was carrying more information, in a richer shape.

Why a price beats a poll

None of this is magic, and the paper is careful not to oversell it. The reasons a market forecast is hard to beat are mundane and structural.

Real money disciplines the answer. A survey respondent who is wrong faces no consequence; decades of research find survey expectations drift, anchor, and lag.¹ A trader who is wrong loses money, and the best-informed traders move the price the most. It updates continuously. A survey is a photograph taken every six weeks; a market is a live feed. The authors show Kalshi's July 2025 rate-cut odds climbing to 25% within minutes of dovish remarks from Governors Waller and Bowman, then collapsing after a strong June jobs report — intraday moves a monthly survey simply cannot see.⁶

And — the part that matters most for risk — it gives you the whole distribution, not a dot. Fed funds futures, to extract a probability, effectively assume just two possible outcomes, which badly understates uncertainty. Kalshi prints the entire spread of bets: the tails, the skew, the fat middle.

That shape is not a luxury. For GDP growth and unemployment, the paper notes, there was simply no market-implied distribution available anywhere before Kalshi — surveys were the only option, and they arrive quarterly.⁵ A whole class of macro risk had no live price at all. There is also a growing body of evidence the authors lean on: far from making prices dumber, retail participation has been making them sharper, because retail order flow carries real information.⁸

It saw the tariff shock in real time

One result in the paper reads like a sequel to our last piece. When the April 2025 tariffs hit, the markets didn't just move — they repriced the shape of macro risk. The authors track the market-implied probability of stagflation: high inflation together with weak growth. Around early April, as the trade news broke, that probability jumped. For the severe version — CPI above 4% with GDP below zero — Kalshi placed more weight on the bad tail than the professional-forecaster survey did, then walked it back as the trade tension eased later in the year.⁷

Sit with what that means. The single biggest macro shock of 2025 — a shock that, as we argued last time, lands hardest in Asia through China+1 and Vietnam — was being measured, in real time and in full distribution, by a market. The professional surveys have no time series to show you that; they only exist as a point, taken before the release. The market was the only instrument that captured the fear as it happened and the relief as it passed.

Now point this at Asia

Here is the move the paper doesn't make, because it's a US paper — but it's the one that matters to us. The Fed found that Kalshi added value at the margin of the deepest forecasting industry on Earth. The United States already has the Survey of Professional Forecasters, Blue Chip, the Bloomberg consensus, fed funds futures, SOFR options, TIPS, inflation swaps. Kalshi competed against all of that and still won on CPI and the funds rate. Now subtract that industry. That is Asia.

For Vietnam's economy, the picture is stark. Official data arrives less often and gets revised more. Independent professional-forecaster surveys are thin. And the market instruments? For the State Bank of Vietnam's policy rate, for Vietnamese CPI, for GDP, there is no liquid domestic market forecast at all. The only thing resembling a market view on the dong lives offshore, in non-deliverable forwards traded in Singapore and Hong Kong. The holes Kalshi fills in America are, in Vietnam, the entire wall.

The implication is not subtle. If a market forecast beats the alternatives in the US — where the alternatives are excellent — then in Vietnam, where the alternatives are sparse or missing, the marginal value of a good market forecast is far higher. A liquid contract on "the State Bank of Vietnam's policy rate at its next meeting," or "Vietnam CPI above 4% in 2026," or "2026 GDP above 7%," wouldn't be competing with a forecasting industry. It would frequently be the best estimate available — because it would be the only one that is live, money-weighted, and distributional.

And the value compounds across the three audiences this whole region cares about. A central bank — the State Bank of Vietnam, Bank Indonesia, the Bangko Sentral — would gain a real-time read on its own credibility and on the tail risks (a currency run, an inflation breakout) that surveys smother into a single number. A business — the exporter, the importer, the lender — would gain something it has never had: a way to hedge domestic macro risk directly, the argument we made last time about basis risk, now applied to the policy rate and the currency instead of a tariff. And an investor weighing where to put a factory would get a transparent, continuously-updated price of country risk — better than waiting on a ratings agency's lagged opinion.

What's hard — especially here

I'd distrust this case if it didn't come with the same honest ledger the paper itself keeps. None of this is free, and Asia makes two of the problems worse.

• Liquidity is the whole game, and it's harder to bootstrap in a smaller market. A market forecast is only as good as the money standing behind it; a thin market is a noisy one. The paper is candid that Kalshi's own tail contracts can go stale when volume is low.⁹ Building that depth on Vietnamese variables, from a standing start, is the real work — not the idea.
• Resolution risk is worse where the statistics are weaker. A market is only as trustworthy as the number that settles it. When official data is revised heavily or released with a lag, "what was CPI" becomes a live question — and a market needs a clean, agreed answer to pay out on.
• A price is a risk-neutral probability, not a crystal ball. As the authors stress, market-implied odds can be tilted by risk premia — what people will pay to hedge, not purely what they believe.⁹ The forecast is excellent on average; it is not infallible on any given day.
• Regulation is the gating step. The reason Kalshi exists is that the US made it legal first — a licensed, surveilled exchange. Most of Asia hasn't drawn that line yet. The forecast Asia is missing is missing for a reason, and the reason is a license, not a lack of demand.

That last point is the one I keep returning to. The Fed paper is, underneath the econometrics, a legitimacy document: a central bank treating market-traded odds as a serious measure of what the economy is about to do. The instrument works — that question is now answered, with data, by people whose job is to be skeptical of it. What's left is the build: the license, the liquidity, the local contracts. The hardest part, and the only part that's still open.

So the map is unusually clear. The place that would benefit most from a live, money-weighted, distributional read on its economy is the place that has the thinnest forecasts and the thickest shocks — the China+1 frontline we wrote about last time, where a tariff in Washington reroutes a factory outside Hanoi. That gap — regulated macro and event markets built for this region, with Vietnam as the launchpad — is exactly what we're building toward at Seeker. The demo is live; the license is the goal, not yet a fact. The Fed just published the evidence that the instrument underneath it is sound. The forecast Asia is missing doesn't have to stay missing.