What if the US tears up the EU auto-tariff cap?
Tearing up the EU auto cap and reimposing 50% tariffs with EU retaliation on Boeing/bourbon/Big Tech is a transatlantic-trade shock -- but the cascade is mis-routed through Alibaba and the yuan, which is a US-China channel; the real pain is EU autos (BMW/VW/Mercedes), Boeing, and US tech-services exposure. Rhymes with the 2018-2019 EU-US Section 232 auto-tariff threats and the 2025 Liberation Day tariff selloff. Transmission: Germany's auto exporters and US aircraft/spirits are the direct hostages. Forward: Big Tech services in the retaliation list is the novel escalation lever versus prior goods-only rounds.
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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 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. US scraps the 15% EU auto cap and reimposes 50% tariffs; EU retaliates on Boeing, bourbon, and Big Tech services. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.