What if a French downgrade reignites bank-sovereign loop fears?
A French downgrade raising risk-weights on BNP/SocGen domestic OAT books is the textbook sovereign-bank doom loop; short French banks vs EU-bank index and widen OAT-Bund. The defining analogue is the 2011-12 eurozone loop when BNP/SocGen lost ~50%+ as sovereign and bank spreads fed each other. France's banks are the eurozone's largest, so this radiates to Italian/Spanish lenders. Forward twist: French banks now hold less domestic sovereign than in 2011, so the loop is weaker than the cascade's -1.7% Solana lead implies.
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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. BNP and SocGen sell off as French sovereign downgrade raises their domestic-bond holdings' risk weighting. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.