What if a hard frost devastates Brazil's coffee crop?
A hard Minas Gerais frost destroys arabica trees — the direct trade is coffee futures to multi-year highs (tree damage = multi-year supply loss), not the wheat/corn-led grain cascade the generic climate root produces. Rhymes with the Jul-2021 Brazil frost that roughly doubled arabica. Transmission: hits roasters (JM Smucker, Nestle) margins and lifts US/EU retail coffee CPI. Forward: a frost kills future crops, not just the current one, so the curve stays inverted for seasons — fade any quick mean-reversion in the front month.
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 6–18 months 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 mixed shock. A hard frost hits Minas Gerais coffee belts, destroying arabica trees and driving futures to multi-year highs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.