What if the US imposes full secondary sanctions on Venezuelan crude?
Blanket secondary sanctions on all Venezuelan-crude buyers remove ~0.9mbpd of heavy sour, tightening the Gulf-Coast complex and bidding Brent/diesel cracks more than headline crude. Echoes the 2019 PDVSA sanctions, which widened heavy-light spreads and hit US Gulf refiners reliant on heavy feed. China and US Gulf refiners are the marginal takers; the loss most hurts complex refining, not light-sweet. Forward angle: smaller barrel count than Iran/Russia, so the war-premium leg should be modest and mean-revert.
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. US imposes blanket secondary sanctions on all buyers of Venezuelan crude, removing barrels and inviting retaliation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.