What if a hawk wins the fight for the ECB presidency?
A Bundesbank-aligned hawk winning the ECB presidency and signaling an end to backstops gaps peripheral spreads wider — short BTPs/OATs and EU periphery banks; the equity/crypto moves are secondary. Rhymes with the Weidmann-era hawkish rhetoric that periodically widened periphery spreads, and the 2011 backstop-skepticism phase. Transmission: removal of implicit ECB support hits the most indebted sovereigns (Italy, France) first. Forward angle: a credibly hawkish chair would reprice the 'ECB put' that has anchored spreads since 2012, making this a structural periphery-widener, not a transient risk-off.
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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 6–18 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. Bundesbank-aligned successor signals end to backstops, peripheral spreads gap wider on the news. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Fed policy path ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.