What if a central-bank governor is assassinated mid-crisis?
Decapitating a central bank mid-crisis removes the implicit policy backstop, so the cleanest move is a VIX spike that mechanically forces risk-parity and vol-target deleveraging — high-beta Nasdaq/semis get sold first, credit spreads widen second. Rhymes with the Lehman weekend (Sep 2008), where loss of a perceived backstop gapped the VIX above 40 and froze funding. Forward angle: unlike 2008, today's options-dealer gamma and 0DTE flows can amplify the first-day air-pocket far faster than the cash market.
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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 Tail risk 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 leading central-bank governor is assassinated or incapacitated mid-crisis. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.