What if the Saudi crown prince is assassinated?
MBS's assassination destabilizes OPEC policy: Brent leads WTI sharply higher on a Gulf supply-risk premium, the refined-product crack and breakevens rise, and VIX spikes. Closest analogues are the Sept-2019 Abqaiq attack (Brent +15% in a day) and the 2020 Saudi-Russia price war. Transmission: Saudi is the swing producer with most of the world's spare capacity, so a policy vacuum threatens the marginal barrel. Forward angle: succession uncertainty over the production-cut framework could swing either way (defend price vs. grab share) — the asymmetry is to the upside given depleted spare capacity elsewhere.
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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 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. The Saudi Crown Prince is assassinated, destabilizing OPEC oil policy. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.