What if Italy's pension bill above 16% of GDP reignites BTP-Bund stress?
Italy's pay-as-you-go pension spending tops 16% of GDP as boomers retire into a shrinking workforce, reviving debt-sustainability doubts and widening the BTP-Bund spread.
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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 3–10 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. Italy's pay-as-you-go pension spending tops 16% of GDP as boomers retire into a shrinking workforce, reviving debt-sustainability doubts and widening the BTP-Bund spread. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Yield-curve slope ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.