What if the Fed quietly expands its balance sheet?
Fed 'reserve-management' UST buying reads as stealth-QE: risk-on across high-beta tech and crypto, VIX and credit spreads compress, front-end yields ease. The template is the Oct-2019 'not-QE' bill-buying that markets treated as liquidity and rode into the early-2020 melt-up. Forward angle: with the balance sheet still large, the liquidity impulse per dollar is smaller than 2019, so the equity beta may underdeliver versus the pure-signal reaction.
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-on shock. The Fed restarts Treasury purchases framed as 'reserve management,' a stealth-QE move that markets read as backdoor monetary easing. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Fed policy path ▼ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.