What if the PLA blockades fuel and power to Matsu?
Cordoning Matsu's fuel and power is sub-kinetic coercion: high-beta and crypto soften, VIX +9, but with no fab or shipping-lane hit the macro damage is limited. Like the 2022 Pelosi-visit PLA exercises that ringed Taiwan and faded within weeks. Transmission runs through risk appetite, not supply chains. Forward angle: an islands-only squeeze lets Beijing test reactions cheaply, so treat the dip as tactical unless it expands toward the main island or the strait.
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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 risk-off shock. PLA coast guard cordons Matsu islands, cutting fuel and power to coerce Taipei without firing. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.