What if Ecuador defaults yet again?
Ecuador's third default is the consequence of an oil slump gutting its dollarized budget, not a cause of one; as a price-taker its default cannot move Brent ~3.6%. The current map has the causation backwards via a large oil-supply shock. This is contained EM credit (Ecuador defaulted in 2008 and 2020 with no global oil impact); the correct shock is idiosyncratic credit with low oil as the trigger, not Ecuador driving crude.
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 0–6 months 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. Quito defaults a third time within fifteen years after oil-price slump guts dollarized fiscal accounts. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Oil demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.