What if an authoritarian seizes power in a large democracy?
An authoritarian seizure in a large democracy spooks capital broadly, so the modeled move is a big VIX spike (+9%) forcing deleveraging into high-beta Nasdaq/semis, with credit widening as the second leg. Rhymes with the political-risk repricing around Turkey's post-2016-coup institutional erosion, where capital flight hammered local assets and the lira. Forward angle: the cascade is US-equity-centric, but the real expression is the targeted country's currency, sovereign spread and equity ADRs — a generic global beta sell understates the local capital-flight damage.
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 3–10 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 risk-off shock. A populist/authoritarian seizure of power in a large democracy spooks capital. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.