What if North and South Korean warships clash along the sea border?
An NLL naval exchange escalating toward war is a contained-but-real flashpoint: VIX +11, Nasdaq -5, high-beta and crypto soften. Directly rhymes with the 2002 and 2009-10 Yellow Sea skirmishes (incl. the Cheonan sinking), which caused short, shallow Kospi/KRW dips that reversed within weeks. Transmission is Korean sentiment, not global supply. Forward angle: the NLL has a long history of bounded clashes, so unless it spreads to land artillery the global market read is a quickly-faded risk-off.
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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. North and South Korean warships exchange fire along the disputed sea border, escalating toward war. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.