What if a Chinese tech giant spirals into a debt crisis?
A leveraged Chinese tech conglomerate facing an unrefinanceable dollar-bond wall forces fire-sale disposals: short China HY and KWEB/Alibaba, long vol, as forced selling pressures the complex. Rhymes with HNA's 2017-20 deleveraging and the 2021 Kaisa/Evergrande dollar-bond cascade — refinancing walls met fire sales and offshore bond repricing. Transmission stays largely within China HY and the megacap complex. Forward: a shut offshore dollar-bond market for Chinese issuers (post-2021) means there is no refinancing escape valve, making the fire-sale path more likely than in HNA's era.
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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 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 leveraged Chinese tech conglomerate faces a dollar-bond wall it cannot refinance, forcing fire-sale asset disposals. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Credit spreads ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.