What if a corporate debt maturity wall triggers a default wave?
A maturity-wall default wave is a pure credit trade: HY bond ETFs mark down first, financials and bank credit books (JPM) follow as refinancing at higher coupons impairs the weakest issuers. Rhymes with the 2015-16 energy HY default cycle (energy spreads ~2000bp) rather than a broad crash. Forward angle: more debt now sits in private credit and direct-lending vehicles that mark slowly, so the public-HY read may understate true stress until the lagged private marks catch up.
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 corporate-debt maturity wall meets high rates, triggering a default wave. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.