Those crafty bookmakers over at TradeSports have decided to put the odds making to the probability of a US Recession in 2007… and here’s the result of the betting on their website:

If you’ve never heard of TradeSports before, they basically have an open marketplace where people bet on everything (politics, sports, pop culture) and real money is risked on being right or wrong. You can read the current value of 25 to more or less be a market prediction of a 25% probability of a recession.

Their definition for recession for the above betting is “…the U.S. will be said to have experienced a recession in 2007 if the Commerce Department numbers as reported on February 15, 2008 show 2 consecutive quarters of negative real GDP growth between 2006:Q4 and 2007:Q4.” (You can read more commentary at Econobrowser.)

I’m adding the TradeSports graph (constantly updated) to the Recession Calculator page as another point of insight.

[Update Feb 1, 2007:] Changed the chart to point to intrade.com.