Keith.Moss's blog

[quote=Erik van Zuylen]Euro 2008 has been quite a spectacle so far. Especially the teams of Spain, Russia, Turkey and the Netherlands have shown why football can be a work of art. Living in the Netherlands it's impossible to be unaffected by the collective emotion sweeping the country, while the television shows images of the orange mass that is invading Switserland and Swiss elderly people claiming 'they have never seen anything like this in their whole live'. Still, it's also interesting to see a poll in the same week, showing that people here are generally negative about mutual respect and solidarity within Dutch society. The contradictions of identity politics… At least the crowd seems to be impressed by the Dutch achievements so far, the team is leading the market with a substantive margin. Who will win Euro 2008?

With the IAEA recently reporting that they believe is Iran is still witholding information on its nuclear program, and the Bush administration winding down, where will US-Iran relations head? How will US-Iranian relations develop in the remaining of 2008?
[quote=Erik van Zuylen]A hot summer?

With the agreement on power sharing this week Lebanon appears to have stepped back from the brink. Will the factions be able to work together in the new government? Traders so far are cautiously optimistic, predicting a 40% chance of a Hezbollah coup in the next two months. Are they right or will the deal collapse in on itself? Will Hezbollah stage a successful coup d'etat?

While the race between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to be the Democratic Presidential nominee keeps on going, there is still the position of Vice Presidential nominee to consider. Will Obama or Clinton end up settling for second billing or will it go to another? We've launched a new openDemocracy inkling market asking: "Who will be the Democratic Vice Presidential Nominee?" Sign up and start trading now!

Traders are so far split on the question of where the price of rice will be in 3 months time with predicted cost at $216, the same as it was for March. Do you disagree with their take on the food crisis situation? What will the price of rice be in July?

The wisdom of the crowd was throughly with Mugabe remaining President past April 30 but the predictions continues with the Who will be the next president of Zimbabwe? market. Will he hang on by hook or by crook in the secound round of voting or will a face-saving deal be recached that sees him exiting the top job in favour of a compromise candidate? Roger Southall has a great analysis of the situation in his article South Africa and Zimbabwe: the end of “quiet diplomacy”?.

With the crisis continuing in Zimbabwe over the as yet undeclared election results our Will Robert Mugabe still lead Zimbabwe on May 1st? market has only one week left to run. Do you think anything significant will happen in the next week or will Robert Mugabe stay on?

With Zimbabwe, China and the Olympics all in the news in recent weeks we have a number of markets covering them.

China
With President Sarkozy making noises about a boycott of the opening ceremony Will any countries boycott the Olympics?

If you haven't heard about the markets before, or simply lost track, then you might like to know that openDemocracy is running a set of predictive markets to tap into the collective knowledge of the oD community in order to predict events around the world.

In the past few weeks we've added a number of markets covering a broad range of topics. Starting with the our series of Russia markets for the opening of the 2008 markets we've gone on and posted markets on economic matters, elections and the Olympics, among others.

Economic
 

The openDemocracy predictive markets are back for 2008.

After a successful first year Tony has passed on the torch of running the markets to me. I've joined the openDemocracy team on a voluntary basis to run the markets for 2008 – and what a year it promises to be! We're planning a series of themed months, closer integration between the markets and the openDemocracy website and we'll endeavour to post more new markets on a more regular basis this year.