What if Moody's strips France of another notch?
A Moody's downgrade with OAT-Bund past 100bp is a contained French sovereign event: sell French banks (SocGen/BNP) and OATs, but the +4.2% VIX and -1.8% Nasdaq overstate US contagion. Rhymes with the Aug-Nov 2024 French budget crisis when OAT-Bund hit ~90bp and briefly traded through Greece, yet eurozone systemic spillover stayed muted. Transmission: French bank balance sheets and EU periphery are the conduits; the ECB backstop caps tail risk. Forward angle: with TPI available, a single-notch cut is a spread-widener, not a redenomination event, so fade aggressive equity-vol bids.
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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. Moody's strips France a notch as Assemblée rejects budget, OAT-Bund spread blows past 100bp. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.