What if Congress bans corporate share buybacks?
Banning buybacks removes the ~$1T/yr marginal buyer of US equities — a structural de-rating of the multiple, not a one-day event: it hits the highest-buyback cohort (megacap tech, financials) hardest and slowly bleeds index support. There is no clean US analogue; the closest is observing how buyback-heavy names underperform when repurchase blackout windows bite each quarter. Forward angle: this is a 1-3yr regime change, so the trade is structural — favor high-FCF dividend payers over buyback-dependent compounders — rather than a tactical short.
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. Congress bans share repurchases for tax-advantaged firms, removing the $1T annual marginal buyer of US equities. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.