What if Korea's jeonse deposit system collapses?
A jeonse unwind is a uniquely Korean leverage chain — landlords using tenant deposits as cheap funding can't refund as prices fall — propagating to savings banks and securities firms; trade short KRW, Korean financials and widen Korean credit. Rhymes with the 2022-23 'villa king' jeonse-fraud wave and the Legoland-PF credit freeze that forced a bond-market backstop. Transmission is largely domestic-financial, so the heavy global crypto/Nasdaq cascade is overstated. Forward angle: deposit-insurance gaps make this more a household-solvency than a bank-capital event.
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. Korea's lump-sum jeonse rental system unravels as landlords cannot refund deposits, spreading tenant bankruptcies and bank stress. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.