What if blue-chip firms lose access to commercial paper overnight?
Blue-chip corporates losing commercial-paper access overnight as money funds halt rollovers forces emergency revolver draws — the trade is a violent funding/liquidity squeeze that hits banks (backstop lines drawn), short-term credit, and equities with no marginal buyer. Direct rhyme: Sept-2008 Reserve Primary 'breaking the buck' froze CP and forced the Fed's CPFF/AMLF; also the Mar-2020 CP seizure that triggered the MMLF. Forward angle: post-2016 money-fund reform pushed assets to government funds, but a prime-fund scare still freezes CP fast — watch for an instant Fed facility re-up as the policy response. Roots (max credit_spreads, tight financial_conditions) are exactly right.
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 0–6 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. Blue-chip corporates lose access to commercial paper overnight as a money-fund scare halts rollovers, forcing emergency credit draws. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.