What if retiring baby boomers force a great asset unwind?
A boomer-retirement 'great unwind' is a slow, secular drawdown of risk and duration: real yields drift up as net sellers replace net buyers, pressuring high-beta tech/crypto and lifting mortgage rates. There is no clean crash analogue; the closest framework is the long-debated 'asset meltdown' hypothesis, which historically underdelivered. Forward angle: 401k auto-flows, target-date glide paths and foreign demand have repeatedly absorbed the demographic drag, so fade abrupt versions of this.
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 baby-boom retirement wave forces mass asset liquidation across markets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Real yields ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.