What if an appeals court orders Google to sell off Chrome?
A forced Chrome divestiture is a single-name structural overhang on Alphabet, not a market event; the broad-tech/crypto-beta wobble is a risk-sentiment tick that fades fast. Rhymes with the Microsoft 2000 breakup-order scare — dramatic headline, reversed on appeal, minimal lasting index damage. Skeptical: remedy is years of litigation away; the modest risk_appetite -0.3 is appropriately small and the crypto cascade is incidental, not causal.
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. On appeal, the DC Circuit reverses Mehta's remedy and orders Alphabet to divest Chrome, overriding the district court's behavioral-only relief. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.