What if an immigration crackdown triggers a labour shortage?
An immigration-crackdown wage spiral is a pure services/ag/construction cost-push, so the trade is long breakevens and short labor-constrained homebuilders, with the Fed forced to hold and real yields drifting up. Direct rhyme is the 2022 services-inflation persistence that kept core CPI sticky despite goods disinflation. Forward angle: services inflation is the hardest for the Fed to tame with rates, so this shock biases 'higher-for-longer' and steepens the policy-path repricing more than a one-off goods shock would.
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 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. An immigration crackdown spikes wages and inflation in services, agriculture and construction. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Labor shortage ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.