What if surging oil imports blow out India's current-account deficit?
An oil-import bill surge pushing India's CAD past 3.5% of GDP is fundamentally a crude shock: long Brent and energy majors is the cleaner expression, with the rupee weakening as reserves drain to fund imports. The provided Israel-Iran/Strait-of-Hormuz analogues fit — India imports ~85% of its crude, so a Gulf war premium hits its external balance hardest among large EMs. Transmission: India is the marginal Gulf-crude buyer. Forward: discounted Russian barrels partly cushion the bill versus prior oil spikes, a new shock-absorber.
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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. An import bill surge pushes India's current-account deficit past 3.5% of GDP, draining reserves and weakening the rupee. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.