Wooster

Moderating toward the crowd.

My math is rusty, but I think the implied 6mo probabilities are about 71% using the last 4 years of data and 47% using the last 10 years of data. So naively averaging those, I land at about a 59% likelihood in the next 6 months. 

It's difficult to pick a particular country that would have a coup in the next 6 months, but at the same time, there seem to be enough low-ish likelihood countries that one of them could well have a successful coup soon. 

Comfortable starting with an average of the short-  and longer-term rates as there hasn't been a successful coup in a year now. Maybe the most likely candidates have all happened in the last few years and we're returning to the previous rate? 

Looks like they're aiming for an election in Nov. 2025, not sure what would cause them to move it forward at this point, so Nov. is probably the earliest it would occur? 

Edit: source

Like @efosong , I'm holding at 5% instead of dropping for time, seeing as IBM is closing their research operations there. 

I suspect long term Microsoft will likely close their AI Research Lab in China, but there's not much time left in 2024 and there doesn't appear to be a near-term catalyst. 

Probably not a great Brier strategy, but willing to come up off 0% on this one...
- Israel's ongoing conflict with Iran's proxies earns them points with a lot of Arab countries even though yes, there would likely need to be peace in Gaza as a minimum requirement before relations could be normalized
- There's a reasonable chance of Trump being re-elected, and his team oversaw the Abraham Accords and likely has more pull with Saudi Arabia and other nations that could potentially normalize. 
- A Saudi friend suggested that Saudi remains very interested in normalizing relations (again, with the Gaza caveat), particularly as they continue to try to diversify away from a pure oil economy and could benefit from friendship with Israel's high tech economy. 

All that to say maybe we should be at 1%, not 0%?

Given the temperature continues to rise between Israel and Hezbollah and Iran, a cyber or kinetic attack on such a facility is easy to imagine within the next 6mo. We'll see what direction things go with Hezbollah, but there don't seem to be a lot of good off-ramps at the moment.