What if drought throttles shipping through the Panama Canal?
Panama Canal draft cuts are a freight-and-routing shock — long container/dry-bulk freight and US Gulf grain basis as cargoes reroute via the Cape or rail, more than an outright grain-price move. Rhymes with the 2023-24 Gatun-Lake drought that slashed daily transits and spiked Neopanamax slot auctions. Transmission hits US-Asia grain and LNG flows plus East-Coast import costs; the modeled wheat/corn ticks understate the real freight-cost channel.
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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 mixed shock. Drought-driven draft restrictions throttle Panama Canal transits, snarling grain and food shipments and lifting freight costs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.