What if Ethiopia fractures into a multi-front civil war?
A three-front march on Addis is a contained tail risk: the clean chain is VIX bid -> vol-target/risk-parity deleveraging -> high-beta Nasdaq/semis sold first, with no commodity leg since Ethiopia exports almost nothing priced globally. Rhymes with the 2020-2022 Tigray war, which barely dented global assets. The real transmission is regional, not market: Gulf/Saudi capital exposure and a renewed Red Sea/Bab-el-Mandeb migration-and-security overhang. Fade the equity dip absent a shipping-lane hit.
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. Tigrayan, Fano and Oromo forces simultaneously march on Addis Ababa, collapsing the federal government into a single multi-front civil war. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.