Google is hiring bond traders, according to a job listing discovered by Business Insider, casting in a new light CEO Eric Schmidt's recent disclosure that the company thought about trying to predict the stock market.

Google has an opening for "Trader, Foreign Government Bonds" in Mountain View where it's headquartered. Requirements include five years bond-trading experience and, since this is Google, "a good sense of humor." Google is trying to make money off its large cash reserves, according to Business Insider, but we wonder if this isn't a trial run of co-founder Sergey Brin's idea to build a Google hedge fund. After all, Schmidt said in Dubai recently that Google "figured we could just try to predict the stock market," but this was one of "many things that Google could do, that we chose not to do... we decided it was illegal."

The nice thing about laws is that they can be re-interpreted all sorts of ways by clever lawyers. But somehow we can't get too exercised over the idea that Google might be able to do what generations of Harvard and MIT grad students failed to do, and reliably predict securities market gyrations. Have fun trying though, guys.