What if cascading failures and jamming degrade the GPS constellation?
GPS degradation is an operational-resilience and timing-infrastructure shock: jamming/failures disrupt aviation, shipping, financial timestamps and precision ag. The tradable read is a tail-risk vol bid plus defense/resilient-PNT names, not a clean credit blowout. Rhymes with the escalating 2024-25 Baltic/Middle-East GPS-jamming incidents that rerouted aviation. Transmission runs through aviation/shipping insurers and timing-dependent finance; the modeled HY-credit leg overstates spillover from a non-financial outage.
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 1–3 years 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. Cascading satellite failures and jamming degrade GPS, disrupting aviation, shipping, finance timestamps and precision farming. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Financial conditions ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.