What if China's oil demand collapses into deep surplus?
A sharp Chinese industrial slowdown swings oil into surplus, but the higher-conviction trade is the metals/FX complex — copper and AUD fall hardest because China is ~55% of copper demand and AUD is the liquid China proxy. Rhymes with the 2015-2016 China hard-landing scare and late-2018 slowdown, which sank copper and the Aussie well before crude. Transmission: Australia/Brazil (iron ore, copper) and Korea/Taiwan (capital goods) are the export funnels into China that get repriced first.
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 sharp Chinese industrial slowdown craters oil demand growth, swinging the market into deep surplus. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Oil demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.