What if a trillion-dollar company suddenly files for bankruptcy?
A trillion-dollar firm filing within weeks on a hidden derivatives book is the Lehman template — credit spreads gap, HY and financials lead down, passive holders are blindsided and forced to sell into no bid. Lehman (Sep-2008) and Archegos (Mar-2021, for the hidden-leverage detonation) are the analogues: opacity plus leverage equals disorderly unwind and counterparty contagion. This is the one scenario in the book where the risk-off is fundamental and persistent; own credit protection and gold, not a fade.
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 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. A trillion-dollar firm files for bankruptcy within weeks after a hidden derivatives book detonates, shocking passive holders. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.