What if a top bank purges a third of its branches for AI and robots?
A single bank's branch purge is a microcap headcount story, not a macro driver; the listed +2% Nvidia/semis cascade is the model over-reading one efficiency-ratio bump as the whole AI-capex wave. Cleaner trade: long the bank's own multiple on cost-out (rhymes with JPMorgan's 2010s branch-rationalization re-rating) rather than chasing GPUs. Skeptical note: teller cuts run on cheap software, not humanoid silicon, so the robotics read is misattributed.
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 risk-off shock. A top bank closes a third of branches for robotic micro-branches and AI, cutting teller jobs and lifting efficiency ratios. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.