What if a new pandemic brings back lockdowns and supply shocks?
A mobility-collapse pandemic is a demand shock to oil: WTI and the refined-product crack (gasoline/diesel/jet) lead lower, energy majors follow upstream revenue, and gold bids on the easing/stimulus reflex. Direct analogue is the March 2020 COVID crash plus the April-2020 negative-WTI demand void, and the Nov-2021 Omicron Black-Friday selloff. Forward angle: with OPEC+ spare capacity tighter and SPR depleted versus 2020, any supply response to defend price is weaker, so the demand-led drawdown could overshoot.
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. A high-transmissibility pathogen triggers renewed lockdowns and supply shocks. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Pandemic shock ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.