What if Chinese households permanently hoard their savings?
A permanent step-down in Chinese consumption (precautionary savings to 40%) guts global luxury, autos and travel: copper, Alibaba and China internet lead, AUD and global growth soften, oil demand eases as the marginal importer retrenches. Rhymes with the 2015-16 China demand scare and, structurally, Japan's post-bubble balance-sheet recession. Forward angle: the transmission is to DM luxury and German autos (LVMH, Mercedes) as much as to China itself, watch European consumer-discretionary as the cleaner short, since the China names already price weakness.
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 1–3 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. Chinese households lift precautionary savings to 40% of income as confidence breaks, gutting global luxury, autos and travel demand. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Growth surprise ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.