What if a coordinated AI-driven layoff wave cuts a million white-collar jobs?
One million coordinated AI-driven white-collar cuts is a genuine macro shock: jobless-claims spike and consumption fear drive credit spreads wide, banks lead lower, and high-beta crypto (Solana, HYPE) is the cleanest short. Rhymes with the Aug-2024 Sahm-rule growth scare that gapped VIX and crypto down hard. Forward angle: unlike past goods-recessions, a services/white-collar shock hits prime-age high-earners — faster spending pullback, slower policy response.
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. Fortune 500 firms announce 1 million coordinated white-collar cuts tied to AI agents, spiking jobless claims and consumer-spending fears. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Recession signal ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.