What if Kenya misses a maturing dollar Eurobond?
Kenya missing a Eurobond and seeking a Chinese bilateral rollover is a contained frontier-credit event: HY softens marginally, with China as the lender-of-last-resort setting terms (Belt-and-Road exposure). Zambia's 2020 default and protracted 2023-24 China-led restructuring is the template. The current map is mis-signed: a Kenyan default does not lift China growth, industrial or oil demand; it is credit stress, so the China-growth impulse should be dropped.
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 0–6 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. Kenya fails to refinance a maturing dollar Eurobond, defaulting and seeking emergency bilateral Chinese rollover. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.