What if the PLA seizes Taiwan's Kinmen islands?
Seizing lightly defended Kinmen is a resolve-test below war: semis and high-beta sell, BTC/SOL drop as risk proxies, but the move is calibrated to avoid the full fab-loss tail. Rhymes with Russia's 2014 Crimea grab (sharp initial risk-off, then fade once markets judged escalation contained). Transmission: TSMC underperformance flows straight to ASML and Nvidia. Forward angle: if Washington under-responds, the cheap-option lesson invites further salami slicing, capping any relief rally.
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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 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. Chinese forces land on and occupy Taiwan's offshore Kinmen islands, testing US resolve below full-war threshold. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.