What if a major card-payment processor is breached?
A top card-processor breach is an idiosyncratic operator/credit hit (reissuance costs, merchant disruption) — not a systemic credit event, so anchoring it to Lehman/BNP-2007 analogues badly overstates contagion; this is closer to the 2013 Target breach, which bruised the issuer and processors but left credit spreads flat. The credit_spreads +0.3 root imports GFC-scale stress that the trigger does not carry.
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 0–6 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 breach of a top card processor exposes hundreds of millions of cards, triggering mass reissuance and merchant disruption. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.