What if China's provincial pension funds run out of money?
Provincial pension funds running dry a decade early is a slow fiscal-demographic drag on China: the China-beta cascade (copper, KWEB, AUD lower) is directionally right but this plays out over years via weaker structural growth, not a market break. No clean analogue — closest is Japan's demographic deflation trap. Transmission: benefit cuts and fiscal transfers crowd out stimulus, capping the China demand impulse that drives copper and AUD. Forward: the shrinking working-age base makes this a one-way structural headwind, not a cyclical dip to fade.
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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 3–10 years 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. Provincial pension funds run dry a decade early as the working-age population shrinks, forcing benefit cuts and fiscal transfers. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Labor shortage ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.