What if the US cut a major economy off from SWIFT?
A SWIFT cutoff of a major economy's banking system is a tail-risk vol event: VIX spikes, forcing risk-parity/vol-target deleveraging that mechanically sells the Nasdaq and semis well beyond fundamentals. The defining analogue is the Feb-2022 freezing of Russia's reserves — the dollar-weaponization shock that gapped commodities and froze cross-border funding. Forward angle: each use accelerates de-dollarization and reserve diversification into gold/CNY rails, so the durable trade is long gold/non-sovereign hedges even as equities later retrace the vol spike.
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. The US sanctions a major economy's banking system with a SWIFT cutoff. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.