What if a new trade bloc forms that shuts out the United States?
A new non-US trade bloc is a trade-tension-plus-dollar-confidence shock, so the trade is modestly higher long yields, a softer chip/Nasdaq complex and gold/bitcoin bid, with Alibaba caught in the crossfire. Rhymes with the 2025 'Liberation Day' tariff regime and the resulting scramble to reroute trade around the US. Transmission: excluding the US reroutes supply chains toward intra-bloc partners; forward angle — the dollar's invoicing dominance means trade can realign long before settlement does, so FX reserves move slower than the trade flows.
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 3–10 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. A new multipolar trade bloc forms that deliberately excludes the United States. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▲ · Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.