What if rating agencies push BB issuers toward CCC in an unusually fast descent?
Severe shocks cause issuers to skip from BB straight toward CCC as agencies catch up to deterioration, an unusually fast rating descent that destabilizes index composition.
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. Severe shocks cause issuers to skip from BB straight toward CCC as agencies catch up to deterioration, an unusually fast rating descent that destabilizes index composition. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Risk-parity deleveraging ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.