What if a lock failure shuts down the Kiel Canal?
A Kiel lock failure reroutes Baltic feeder traffic around Denmark - a regional shipping inconvenience, not a macro event - so the tiny sub-0.2% rates/EUR moves are correctly scaled and this barely registers beyond intra-European logistics. No real market analogue; it is too small to rhyme with energy-crisis episodes. Germany/Scandinavia/Baltics are the affected feeder lanes; the forward angle is the european_energy root slightly overstates it - Kiel is mostly dry-bulk and feeder, so even EUR/USD -0.1% may be generous.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), from the past toward the Tail risk 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A catastrophic lock failure shuts the Kiel Canal, rerouting Baltic feeder traffic the long way around Denmark. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — European energy ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 30y Treasury yield DGS30 📈 chart | Rate | ▲ +1bp hist -2.65–+12.62% · other way -5.1% (n=12) |
| 2 | 10y Treasury yield DGS10 📈 chart | Rate | ▲ +1bp hist -2.42–+9.84% · other way -8.3% (n=12) |
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 30y yield DGS30 | LONG | +11bp · 5d +3bp | 67% | 39 | 0.28 | ✓ matches cascade |
| 10y yield DGS10 | LONG | +8bp · 5d +3bp | 65% | 40 | 0.22 | ✓ matches cascade |
| Volatility VIX | LONG | +3.5% · 5d -1.7% ↺ fades | 57% | 36 | 0.12 | · |
| High-yield credit HYG | SHORT | -0.2% · 5d +0.0% ↺ fades | 58% | 35 | 0.12 | · |
| Gold XAU | LONG | +0.8% · 5d -0.3% ↺ fades | 55% | 35 | 0.09 | · |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +0.3% · 5d +0.2% | 52% | 40 | 0.04 | · |
| Bitcoin BTC | LONG | +1.2% · 5d -2.3% ↺ fades | 47% | 34 | 0.00 | · |
Why this probability
Catastrophic Kiel lock failure is rare structural one-off; tail risk, minimal base rate. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.