If there were any lingering doubts that Wall Street is a big casino, this article ought to erase them. The New York Times reports that two companies want to start a market in film futures.

Both the Cantor futures exchange and Veriana Networks would allow investors to buy or sell — or “short” — contracts based on a movie’s box-office receipts, in essence betting on how well a film will do when released in theaters.

You would think that after the innovations that led to the Great Crash, things like credit default swaps, synthetic CDOs, auction rate securities, and the corruption involved even with supposedly useful things like interest rate swaps, that Wall Street would have thought that now might not be the best time to introduce more casino capitalism. But no. First it was Death Bonds, the impolite name given to securitization of viatical settlements. That one seems to have disappeared, possibly because Standard and Poors gave chapter and verse explaining why it wouldn’t rate them, and possibly because the SEC testified that it would give Death Bonds the stinkeye.

But, as Alan Greenspan is fond of telling anybody who might still be listening, innovation is just the best. Let’s see how movie grosses compare to a contract traded on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange: Frozen Pork Bellies. That’s right, pre-bacon. You can buy or sell contracts for 40,000 pounds of 12-18 pound pork bellies any time between 9:05 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. at open outcry on the floor of the Merc. How do Pork Bellies compare with movie grosses?

Pig farmers can hedge against a drop in pork prices. Bacon makers and users can buy futures contracts to insure supply. Then there are speculators who think Pork Bellies are a good way to bring home the … big money. They can gufess at the direction the price of Pork Bellies based on whatever tarot card/Gaussian copula/tip from a hog merchant they like. There you have it: the three legs of the commodities stool.

Movie studios get a lot of money from investors, and if you want to invest, you could try this site. Or, if you are really rich, you can get directly into the business. When things were great, people thought throwing their money at movies was a kick. Now, they want some security. If you can buy a credit default swap on a pile of worthless mortgages, surely there’s a way to hedge your investment in Rocky The Next: Geriatric Boxing.

If Veriana and Cantor Fitzgerald have their way, movie investors will be able to hedge if they can find someone to take the other side of their bet. Who would that be? Let’s just be blunt. That would be a gambler. There isn’t anyone who wants to buy a tanked movie. The only reason to do this is to bet on the success of a movie you haven’t seen. Veriana is blunt about this:

Opportunities exist for speculators to be fairly compensated for assuming these risks, while at the same time providing the producers and other segments of the industry with an effective risk mitigation opportunity at a reasonable price.

“As in all futures markets, there is a potential win-win scenario where everybody is better off through enabling the production risk to be sold to a community of speculators willing to assume these risks in exchange for receiving a suitable risk premium,” Veriana said.

This is a two legged stool, and about as stable. It’s a joke on the people who think markets are the highest form of human interaction, namely Wall Street and its economist enablers.