What if China developer-default cascade reignites and saps commodity demand?
A fresh wave of Chinese developer defaults and stalled-project escrow stress collapses new starts, cutting steel and copper demand; the property cascade pressures iron ore, base metals and commodity-linked currencies.
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 fresh wave of Chinese developer defaults and stalled-project escrow stress collapses new starts, cutting steel and copper demand; the property cascade pressures iron ore, base metals and commodity-linked currencies. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▼ · China growth ▼ · Industrial demand ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.