What if container freight rates spike fivefold?
Compounding Red Sea and Panama disruptions sending Shanghai-LA spot above $10k is a margin and goods-inflation shock; the cleanest trade is the inflation-expectations/breakeven leg and importer-retailer margins, with only a modest crude bid. Rhymes with the 2021-22 container spike that fed the CPI overshoot. China-to-US Pacific lanes are the chokepoint; cost lands on US importers and consumers. Forward angle: freight is mean-reverting and capacity-elastic — the inflation impulse is a one-off level shift, not persistent, so fade the breakeven move on normalization.
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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 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. Compounding Red Sea and Panama disruptions send Shanghai-LA spot rates above 10,000 dollars, gutting importer margins. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.