What if a mass-casualty attack hits a major Western airport?
A mass-casualty attack on a Western hub airport is a pure risk-appetite/aviation shock: the clean chain is VIX up -> airlines and travel sold, crypto and high-beta dumped as the liquid risk proxy -- the crypto-heavy cascade captures the 24/7 sell-first dynamic. Rhymes with 9/11, after which US airlines were halted and the sector cratered on reopening while the broad market fell ~12% over the week. Transmission: global aviation, insurers, and travel/leisure; no commodity leg. Forward: the V-shaped recovery in past terror selloffs argues for fading the equity drop once reopening is clear.
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 1–3 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. A coordinated terrorist assault on a major Western hub airport halts global aviation and spikes security shutdowns. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.