What if China attempts a decapitation strike on Taipei?
A decapitation strike on Taipei is the same fab-loss tail as full invasion but faster and more chaotic: VIX +20, Nasdaq -9, TSMC -6 as markets price a leadership vacuum plus chip-supply seizure. Like an Israel-on-Iran first-strike (June 2025) compressed onto the world's most critical supply chain. Transmission hits Apple, Nvidia, and the entire fabless ecosystem simultaneously. Forward angle: a rapid-capitulation gambit could paradoxically shorten the disruption if fabs survive intact, so the V-shape risk is real.
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 Tail risk 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. China attempts missile and special-forces decapitation of Taiwan's leadership to force rapid capitulation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.