What if a strike over automation snarls the port of Los Angeles?
A West Coast automation strike into peak holiday season snarls trans-Pacific imports - a domestic goods-inflation and discretionary-retail squeeze, modest for risk assets, so the small Nasdaq -0.3% and inflation-exp +0.4% are right-sized. Rhymes with the 2014-15 West Coast slowdown that jammed LA/Long Beach for months and the 2002 lockout. The US is the importer; Asian exporters feel the order backup. The forward angle is automation is the structural fault line, so like its East Coast twin this risks a longer, more inflationary standoff than priced.
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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 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 mixed shock. West Coast dockworkers strike over terminal automation, snarling trans-Pacific imports into peak holiday season. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.