Flip? Prediction Markets at July’s End

For party of winner, 50-50 as of noon ET today (PredictIt):

There was a gap as of midnight this AM. Over the past 90 days:

A woman as next president was 50 cents as of midnight:

Kamala Harris as next president at 53 cents at midnight.

Discussion here.

Addendum:

What’s the news to impel movement? Maybe this:

Source: Bloomberg (7/31/2024).

 

33 thoughts on “Flip? Prediction Markets at July’s End

  1. pgl

    Trump suggests Harris would struggle with world leaders based on her appearance
    https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/politics/trump-suggests-harris-would-struggle-with-world-leaders-based-on-her-appearance/ar-BB1qVog8?ocid=BingNewsSerp

    “Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump suggested that Vice President Harris wouldn’t be able to stand up to world leaders because of her appearance, adding that he didn’t want to spell it out but viewers would know what he meant.”

    What did he mean? Oh yea – Harris is a COLORED WOMAN.

    Now we know Putin respects really fat dudes with an ugly orange hairdo and small hands etc. MAGA!

    1. Macroduck

      Presently, women serve as head of state in 28 countries. In the past, women have served as head of state or head of government in Germany, India, Brazil, Israel and the UK, among others. The U.S. rather stands out for never having elected a woman to lead the country.

      People of color have served as head of state or government in much of the world, including the U.S.

      Short people? James Madison was 5’4″. Kamala Harris is 5’4″. Madison was the 4th president of the United States, “Father of the Constitution” and co-author of the Federalist Papers. Unlike Trump, “Little Jimmy” Madison won re-election.

      Kamala isn’t obese, doesn’t have the world’s most ridiculous comb-over or a tie that reaches her socks.

      1. pgl

        Do you remember why Trump choose Powell over Yellen for FED chair? Had something to do with the fact she is 5 feet 3 inches. Funny thing – the dean of conservative economists was Milton Friedman who just happened to be 5 feet 0 inches.

      2. Moses Herzog

        Which Black peoples are so UNBELIEVABLY DUMB they will now vote for him?? Which ones?? If you are Black and vote for donald trump, don’t EVER wonder why your intelligence as a race is satirized. Don’t ever wonder again if you voted for donald trump why people “Look down on” you
        https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-focuses-harris-race-black-jobs-combative-panel-black-journalists-rcna164271

        Your choice~~~~vote for donald trump and be viewed as genetic morons. Or don’t.

        1. Ivan

          That was such a disaster you wonder why the heck he went there in the first place. He had to have anticipated a somewhat hostile setting. If you can’t stand the heat why go into the kitchen.

          1. baffling

            if you noticed, his initial response was to bully the journalist asking questions. and try to turn the tables. but it seems that trick is not working much anymore. people seem to anticipate his confrontational nature now. the mystique is wearing off for many. which is good.

  2. baffling

    rick stryker is simply getting crushed with his harris short bet. crushed. i have not seen such bleeding in years. he was probably long housing in 2006 as well. this is why you don’t take investment advice fro pundits and amateurs.

  3. Macroduck

    Off topic – trade-offs between environmental quality and economic performance:

    We are often treated to the claim that environmental protection is expensive, and must be evaluated against its benefits. The demand for cost-benefit analysis is often disingenuous, imbedded in a wider effort to discredit or diminish environmental protection: Social discount rates are jiggered to make sure the future is undervalued; distributional effects are ignored; risks are ignored.

    More than anything, the benefits of environmental protection are ignored – which is kinda odd, when doing cost-benefit analysis. The first step in assessing the future benefits of environmental protection is to tally up current environmental benefits, but it’s rarely done. Turns out, some serious effort has been put into accounting for environmental benefits, under the label “Gross Ecosystem Product” or GEP. Here’s one effort at calculating GEP:

    https://phys.org/news/2024-03-global-ecosystem-contributes-trillions-key.html

    By this estimate, GEP worldwide has lately been about 1.85 times GDP. That is to say, we receive net “services” from the natural world considerably in excess of the benefits of our own endeavors. Environmentally, we have more good days than bad. Don’t believe it? Hold your breath. Go a few days without water. Never go for another walk or a swim or a picnic.

    David Zetland, at “The One-Handed Economist”, makes an interesting observation. He sums up GDP and GEP, and observes that, as we progress toward having more bad days than good ones, the combined total is likely to begin to decline. We will devote more GDP toward offsetting bad days as GEP falls (which to my way of thinking, compounds the decline in environmental benefits):

    https://one-handed-economist.com/?p=4943

    Zetland calls this decline in the sum of GDP and GEP a decline in wealth. Well, OK. I’d go with a decline in income – product and income are pretty interchangeable in economic parlance. Wealth generally represents a future stream of income, so Zetland isn’t wrong.

    But let’s not quibble over language. The point to take is that by pursuing GDP at the expense of environmental quality, we make ourselves poorer. So next time somebody insists on a cost-benefit analysis for environmental protection, tell ’em they need to look at the sum of GDP and GED over future years. If they don’t understand how that works, they probably have no business pretending to understand cost-benefit analysis.

    1. 2slugbaits

      Macroduck I would argue that we should be looking at a properly estimated NDP rather than GDP. What we really care about is how much we can consume today without eating tomorrow’s seed corn. Inattention to the depreciation of our environment amounts to eating our seed corn.

      1. Macroduck

        I’ll sign on with NDP. My appreciation for Zetland’s argument is that he makes a math argument so simple (once someone else has done a hugely complex evaluation of GEP), that it is hard to misunderstand. The writers’ rule – show, don’t tell – really works.

      2. baffling

        may be true, but we don’t need to complicate the matter, as macroduck noted. the important thing is to examine how GDP or NDP varies with respect to GEP. if you quibble over GDP vs NDP, you don’t really get a different observed outcome, I would imagine. but you give opponents ammunition to argue your approach is wrong. then they throw the baby out with the bath water.

  4. pgl

    I just watched the insults Trump hurled at those black journalists and the reactions afterwards. His support among black men just went to zero. The racist piece of trash even suggested Kamala Harris never said she was black until recently. Huh Howard University and her AKA sorority is some haven for people from India? Seriously.

    Except his chances of winning will take another dip.

  5. Macroduck

    No ease from the Fed today – quelle surprise! Powell said “September” out loud.

    December futures are pricing in nearly 2-to-1 odds in favor of 75 basis points in rate cuts by year end. Tens have shed nearly 10 basis points. S&P up 1.6%.

    1. baffling

      if the FED were serious, it would have dropped 0.25% today. they are willing to tackle a recession and miss the soft landing, to avoid a confrontation with trump over the next few months. if trump or an election were not just around the corner, they most likely would have started easing yesterday. so the FED is somewhat compromised by trying to act not compromised. trump continues to damage the economy, even when not in office. remember who appointed powell in the first place.

      I was listening to powell on Bloomberg yesterday. he was coming up with all kinds of excuses for why they are waiting at least another meeting to ease rates. my impression was that he knew an easing yesterday would be a good move, but would rather face the consequences of being wrong late than early. and I am not an enemy of powell. but I think trump is in his ear, and pushing the scales for him.

      1. baffling

        well the data just came out and employment is weakening. and the market is getting routed as a result. so the FED is wrong. it should drop at least a quarter point immediately. or it will lose its chance at a soft landing. real rates are too tight, and negatively impacting the economy right now. the FED needs to get to neutral quickly. but they are afraid of the baboon trump and his loudspeaker.

  6. pgl

    The word weird has been used to capture a lot of what MAGA morons have been saying of late. Jesse Watters must have won the gold for weird:

    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/certified-weirdo-fox-host-roasted-for-confusion-how-men-could-vote-for-democrats/ar-BB1qUQxa

    Fox News host Jesse Watters fumed that men who vote for Vice President Kamala Harris might as well turn in their man cards during a segment of “The Five” on Tuesday, discussing Harris’ wildly successful “White Dudes for Harris” livestream at the start of the week, which racked up millions of dollars from hundreds of thousands of donors. “Now, I don’t see why any man would vote Democrat,” said Watters, who just a week previously was schooled for trying to claim Harris didn’t earn her position of power. “It’s not the party of virtue, security, it’s not the party of strength, it’s definitely not the party of family. And to be a man, and then vote for a woman, just because she’s a woman, is either childish, that person has Mommy issues, or they’re just trying to be accepted by other women. And I heard the scientists say the other day, that when a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”

    1. Macroduck

      Jesse (Isn’t that a girl’s name?) Waters is aping Trump. “And I heard the scientists say the other day, big scientists, really strong scientists, tears running down their faces…”

      Among my favorite rules of thumb is “If the facts don’t fit your model, you have the wrong model.” Waters doesn’t understand how 190,000 men could support Harris. In fact, more like 35-40 million men support Harris. (There were 158 million votes cast in the 2020 presidential election. The rest of the math is left to curious readers.) If Waters doesn’t understand, it’s because he has the wrong model of manhood.

      Of course, Waters doesn’t really mean he doesn’t understand. Understanding stuff isn’t what he does for a living, so he doesn’t bother understanding. He needs something bombastic and misogynistic to say, then it’s “job done”.

    2. Ivan

      They are seeing the tide turn and they are getting desperate and angry. Nothing they have tried seems to help.

    3. Ivan

      The brilliant thing about switching from the label “scary” to “weird” is that the right wingers will wear “scary” as a badge of honor (see we are scaring all those liberals) – whereas weird is not a label anybody is happy being associated with.

      1. baffling

        you have a point. and this is not an easy adjective for trump to respond to. calling somebody weird or strange is not quite so controversial that it gets a bombastic reply, and if it does get such a reply, one has to wonder why you are so bothered by being called weird.
        but trump and vance are weird. and what is with vance and the mascara? he does not wear it well at all.

  7. Macroduck

    “Daily Wire” is “a conservative American news site” and Andrew Klavan is a bloviator there. Thus is from his latest bloviation:

    “There is a sense in which the central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable.”

    https://www.mediamatters.org/daily-wire/daily-wire-host-goes-strange-sexist-rant-women-cannot-take-care-themselves

    He could be describing sex trafficking, but he isn’t. It’s a world view that is OK to profess. Outside of Saudi Arabia!

    It ain’t just Vance and Trump and every Republican governor and legislator.

    1. pgl

      “There is a sense in which the central purpose of every society is to figure out the distribution of women because women are valuable. They’re valuable not just for their company and for their way of looking at things and for sex, which is a lot of fun, but also because they are the only path there is to continuing your genetic inheritance. That is the way it is. When men want women on this kind of basic animalistic, just life level, to reproduce. Right? So the most obvious way to distribute women is to give all the women to the strongest man. Right? So you get — reproduce from the strongest person. That’s the way gorillas — many gorillas, silverbacks live.”

      Could it be – MAGA morons are all gorillas?! Maybe the Trump vision of the future was predicted by Planet of the Apes!

      1. Baffling

        Just as a reminder, trump already lost an election to kamala harris once. In a landslide. What are you called when you lose consecutive elections to a woman?

  8. pgl

    More evidence that Trump is delusional:

    Trump Says He ‘CRUSHED It’ At Black Journalists’ Conference
    https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-says-he-crushed-it-at-black-journalists-conference/ar-BB1qYVat?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=242a47503a944fdf97bbfeca5939f622&ei=13

    Former President Donald Trump, who ended his appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists conference in Chicago early and questioned Vice President Kamala Harris’ race in a series of now-viral remarks, took to Truth Social on Wednesday to announce that he “crushed it” during the interview. “The questions were Rude and Nasty, often in the form of a statement, but we CRUSHED IT,” Trump wrote in his post.

    Maybe Trump needs to drop out and let the younger but really stupid J D Vance head the ticket.

    1. Ivan

      Trump is just such a weird little sissy boy. He constantly complains. Manly men don’t complain they get to work and solve problems without a grunt. When he is not whining about stuff, he comes up with silly little school yard nick names for people he dones’t like – manly men ignores people they don’t like. He invent these weird attacks on groups of “others” to try get people behind him based on hating and fearing those “others” – manly men get people behind them based on great ideas and logic plans for how to get there. Manly men are for Harris – only weird little sissy boys would fall for Trump.

      1. baffling

        there goes trump, trying to rewrite history with alternative facts. again. not sure how you can “ace” any cognitive test while living in a world of alternative facts.

        1. pgl

          Speaking of Alternative Facts, Kelly Anne Conway may behind a lot of the bad press with respect to JD Vance. The knives are sharp within Team Trump.

  9. joseph

    Also from the National Association of Black Journalists —

    Trump: “My message is to stop people from invading our country that are taking, frankly, a lot of problems with it, but one of the big problems … coming from the border are millions and millions of people that happened to be taking Black jobs.”

    Journalist Rachel Scott: “What exactly is a Black job sir?”

    And of course all those journalists in the room know exactly what Trump means.

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