What if Moody's downgrades Alberta as oil revenues weaken?
An Alberta downgrade is a symptom of weak oil revenue, not a cause of falling crude — the modeled chain runs backwards, dragging Brent/WTI down via the downgrade when causality is the reverse. The real read is wider Alberta provincial spreads and a softer loonie; oil should be treated as the exogenous driver, not the victim. Rhymes with the 2015-16 oil crash that hammered Alberta's budget and CAD. The fix removes the spurious oil-supply leg and keeps it a contained provincial-credit and CAD event.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
The butterfly cascade
How this trigger trickles across markets, left → right — the root shock, its first‑order moves, then the ripple effects. Drag any node; tap a market for its real price history.
Resolution timeline — how this probability is moving
Our model's odds (electric blue) over time vs the market's (Polymarket, amber), from the past toward the 0–6 months horizon. Each dot is a real macro event that nudged the probability — green pushed it up, red pushed it down. Tap a dot for the source. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Moody's cuts Alberta from Aa2 as oil revenues weaken and spending-driven deficits balloon, ending its outlier top-tier provincial rating. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.