What if California wildfire mega-loss: $40B + utility liability?
A wind-driven wildfire complex burns through exurban California, producing ~$40B insured losses and reigniting inverse-condemnation liability fears that crush utility (XLU) equity and bonds.
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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 risk-off shock. A wind-driven wildfire complex burns through exurban California, producing ~$40B insured losses and reigniting inverse-condemnation liability fears that crush utility (XLU) equity and bonds. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.