What if the Treasury exhausts its extraordinary measures at the X-date?
Hitting the X-date with no deal stresses the front end specifically — T-bills maturing around the date cheapen sharply while the broad market mostly shrugs, since default is viewed as a political near-miss. Rhymes with the 2011 and 2023 debt-ceiling standoffs, where bill kinks blew out but equities only wobbled and snapped back on resolution. The transmission is money-market funds avoiding at-risk bills; the forward read is that a true breach (vs. brinkmanship) is unpriced — the modeled moves here are appropriately modest.
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. Treasury exhausts extraordinary measures with X-date reached and no debt-limit deal in sight. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Volatility (VIX) ▲ · Credit spreads ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.