What if a cyberattack blacks out Europe's power grid?
A multi-day European grid blackout is a contained-confidence shock: VIX +10, a shallow Nasdaq/S&P dip, with the real bid in European power/gas via the energy-security channel. No clean market analogue — closest is the Apr-2025 Iberian blackout, which barely moved broad indices but spiked local power prices. Transmission: the hit concentrates in European industrials and utilities (input-cost and downtime), not US tech; the durable trade is long EU power/gas and short exposed manufacturers — the global beta move fades within days absent escalation.
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 6–18 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. A cyber-physical attack blacks out a major European power grid for days. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · European energy ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.