What if a contested US election sparks a constitutional crisis?
A contested US election attacks the reserve asset itself, so the tell is the long end selling (30y/10y +4bp) alongside gold and bitcoin bid as dollar-confidence hedges — equities fall but Treasuries do NOT rally, the classic 'sell-America' signature. Rhymes with the Aug 2011 US debt-ceiling/downgrade episode, where stocks fell yet the dollar-and-Treasury haven trade frayed. Forward angle: a true constitutional crisis breaks the reflexive flight-to-Treasuries assumption, making gold and BTC the cleaner hedges than USTs.
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. A contested US election triggers a constitutional crisis and civil unrest. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ · Volatility (VIX) ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.