What if a mutated MERS coronavirus turns airborne in the Gulf?
This one is two-sided and correctly so: airborne MERS on the Arabian Peninsula threatens Gulf oil-worker camps and Hajj — Brent gains a supply-risk premium over WTI even as global mobility/demand softens, with gold bid. Rhymes with 2020's collision of COVID demand-destruction and the Saudi-Russia supply war. The Brent-over-WTI split (oil_supply_risk 0.4 vs. demand-side pandemic) is the smart, distinctive call — trade the Brent-WTI spread wider; roots are sensible.
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. Mutated MERS coronavirus gains airborne efficiency on the Arabian Peninsula, threatening Gulf oil-worker camps and Hajj travel. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ · Pandemic shock ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.