A favored technique of forensic economists is to look at how the stock market reacts to surprises to measure how investors value things like political connections. In Economic Gangsters, for example, we value political ties in Indonesia by examining what happened to politically connected companies when President Suharto had health problems.

A recent study looks at how the market reacted to events that no one should have known about in the first place: authorizations of top-secret CIA-sponsored coups in Latin America and the Middle East. We’ve written it up for this morning’s edition of Slate (They made a killing). Take a look to see what this research might tell us about the cloak-and-dagger diplomacy of the Bush administration.

-Ray F.