What if FX-hedging costs become prohibitive for Japanese life insurers' vast foreign-bond books?
A widening US-Japan rate gap makes FX-hedging Japanese life insurers' vast foreign-bond books prohibitively costly, forcing unhedged risk or repatriation that dislocates JGB and global bond markets.
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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 1–3 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. A widening US-Japan rate gap makes FX-hedging Japanese life insurers' vast foreign-bond books prohibitively costly, forcing unhedged risk or repatriation that dislocates JGB and global bond markets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — US dollar (DXY) ▲ · Credit spreads ▲ · Real yields ▲ · Risk-parity deleveraging ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.