What if China and Russia formalise an anti-Western alliance?
A formal China-Russia anti-Western bloc blends geopolitical risk with dollar-confidence erosion, so the trade is a VIX bid plus the long end selling and gold up, with equities lower — a hybrid risk-off-and-reserve-flight signature. Rhymes with the post-2022 deepening of the Sino-Russian 'no limits' axis that accelerated yuan settlement and reserve diversification. Forward angle: a formal bloc hardens supply-chain and energy realignment (cheap Russian crude to China), so the durable expression is commodities-and-FX bifurcation more than a one-off equity drawdown.
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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 risk-off shock. China and Russia formalize a strategic anti-Western alliance and trade bloc. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.