What if China floods the world with subsidized steel and solar?
The clean chain is deflationary, not risk-off: subsidized Chinese steel/solar/chemical dumping collapses ex-China producer margins and goods prices, so short rival-nation industrials and ferrous/PV supply chains rather than buying the broad Nasdaq selloff the cascade implies. Rhymes with 2015-16 China steel/aluminum glut that gutted ArcelorMittal and US Steel and forced Section 232. Transmission: China exports the deflation; EU/US/India retaliate with anti-dumping duties, so the yuan softens and copper sags on the demand-glut signal. Forward angle: today the flood is in EVs/solar/batteries, where Western tariff walls are already up, blunting the price pass-through.
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 risk-off shock. Subsidized Chinese steel, solar and chemicals flood global markets, collapsing prices and bankrupting rival-nation producers. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▼ · Inflation surprise ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.