What if Japan's labour force falls off a cliff?
A 2% workforce contraction is a slow-burn supply shock, not a tradable event: the muted cascade (mild inflation-expectations lift, small margin squeeze) is correctly sized — structural labor scarcity raises unit costs and nudges the BOJ, but over years, not days. Loosely rhymes with post-2010s Japanese labor tightness that lifted services inflation without a market break. Forward: the cleaner expression is long Japanese automation/robotics capex beneficiaries versus labor-intensive domestic names, not a macro risk trade.
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 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. Accelerating deaths over births shrink the workforce 2% in a year, throttling output and forcing radical immigration or automation bets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Labor shortage ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.