What if Catalonia stages another independence referendum?
A fresh Catalan secession vote with Article 155 invoked slumps IBEX and Spanish banks (CaixaBank/Sabadell) — that is the trade, not the +7.0% VIX / -3.1% Nasdaq the cascade prints. Rhymes with the Oct 2017 referendum when IBEX and Spanish banks sold off and firms redomiciled out of Catalonia, yet spillover stayed local. Transmission: Spanish bank deposit/redomicile flight and Spanish sovereign sympathy; Bunds marginally bid. Forward angle: markets learned in 2017 this is contained to Spanish equities/spreads, so fade any global-vol overreaction.
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. Generalitat stages a fresh secession vote, Madrid invokes Article 155, IBEX and bank shares slump. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.