What if foot-and-mouth disease reaches Australia?
FMD entering Australia is a beef-export catastrophe for Australia specifically — short AUD and Australian beef/livestock exporters, long competing US/Brazil beef as Asian buyers reroute; it is not a semiconductor or yuan trade. Rhymes with the 2022 Indonesia/Bali FMD scare that put Australia on knife-edge biosecurity alert; a real incursion could cost tens of billions over years. Transmission runs Australia-to-Japan/Korea/China beef trade; the modeled Nasdaq/TSMC cascade is the wrong market entirely.
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 1–3 years 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 mixed shock. Foot-and-mouth disease enters Australia, halting a top beef exporter and reshaping global meat trade flows. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.