What if the US barred outbound investment in Chinese tech?
An outbound-investment ban into Chinese tech/AI is a slow capital-flow squeeze on China venture/growth funding, mildly risk-off for the tariff-exposed sleeve and a drag on Alibaba and the yuan, but the macro impulse is modest versus an outright tariff. Closest rhyme is the Aug-2023 Biden outbound EO, which had muted immediate market impact. Skeptic's note: the channel is primary capital, not trade flows, so the equity cascade is overstated — the real effect is a higher China cost of capital that compounds over years, not a gap day.
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 6–18 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 mixed shock. The US restricts outbound investment into Chinese tech and AI. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.