What if accelerating Japanese depopulation structurally shrinks the deposit base of regional banks and shinkin?
Accelerating depopulation and aging in the regions structurally shrink the low-cost deposit base that funds regional banks and shinkin, eroding the franchise value that underpins their sub-0.5x book valuations and viability.
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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 3–10 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. Accelerating depopulation and aging in the regions structurally shrink the low-cost deposit base that funds regional banks and shinkin, eroding the franchise value that underpins their sub-0.5x book valuations and viability. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Labor shortage ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.