What if North Korea's regime collapses and its nuclear weapons go loose?
Kim's sudden death and a succession war put loose nukes in play: VIX +16, Nasdaq -7, defense names bid on the secure-the-weapons scramble. Closest analogues are prior Kim health scares (2014, 2020) that caused brief KRW/Kospi wobbles, but an actual collapse with China and the US both moving in is far larger. Transmission: Korean memory supply and refugee/region risk. Forward angle: the binary is wide: an orderly handover barely moves markets, while a contested collapse near Chinese intervention is a genuine tail, so vol is mispriced cheap.
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. Kim's sudden death sparks a succession war and a scramble to secure loose nuclear weapons. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.