What if dozens of Korean counties hit demographic extinction?
Korean rural counties hitting demographic-extinction thresholds and abandoning housing/schools is a structural decline signal, not an acute shock — the near-zero cascade is appropriate. Rhymes with Japan's regional akiya/depopulation path, which Korea is following with the world's lowest fertility. Transmission is into regional-bank collateral and local-government viability, contained domestically. Forward angle: Korea's sub-0.8 TFR makes this faster than Japan's, sharpening the long-run case against KRW assets and regional banks but offering no near-term trade. Roots minimal and correct.
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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 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. Dozens of Korean rural counties hit demographic-extinction thresholds, abandoning housing stock and schools. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Recession signal ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.