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?

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.

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The oD Sophocrats

openDemocracy launched a set of predictivemarktes in January 2007. The idea was that byallowing oD readers to buy and sell forecasts, the oD crowd wouldreveal its special wisdom.

350 readers signed up to the markets over the year. They were give$1000 to buy forecasts. For example, at the start of the year, youcould buy "Sarkozy becomes French President" for $40. When he becamepresident, you could cash that out for $100. In between time, if theprice on Sarkozy seemed to you out-of-kilter, you could trade andspeculate on the price movements. The top ten traders have shown a realskill and dedication. Tan Copsey, my colleague from China Dialogue,had an eye-popping run of profitable predicting, turning those $1,000into $135,442 - I am sure that he can rest assured of an alternativecareer as a carbon trader.