What if the PLA fires on a Philippine resupply mission at Mischief Reef?
PLA fire on a Philippine resupply run invokes the mutual-defense treaty and a standoff: VIX +13, Nasdaq -6, BTC/SOL down as treaty-trigger risk reprices beta. Like the 2023-24 Second Thomas Shoal water-cannon clashes, but live-fire is a sharp rung higher than the historical analogue's non-lethal harassment. Transmission is risk appetite and shipping insurance. Forward angle: a kinetic Mischief Reef event is the first real test of whether the MDT actually pulls the US in, and that ambiguity is what markets will discount.
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. PLA fires on a Philippine resupply mission, invoking the US-Philippines treaty and a great-power standoff. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.