Intrade, the online trading site, is giving the president's health care package a 62.5 percent chance of being passed. That number has been spiking sharply in the past week or so (it had fallen to about 30 percent in early March). NYT columnist Paul Krugman points out that "betting markets don't have any mystical power, but they do summarize conventional wisdom pretty well; and judging from Intrade, health reform has gone from a long shot to more likely than not."
*Clusterstock has an interesting take:
We reached out to InTrade CEO John Delaney, who confirmed that a lot of the trade volume on this particular contract is coming out of DC. Specifically he said: "...it is a reasonably active market but atypically a lot of the trade is coming from the DC area when normally we might see trade coming from all the major urban areas."