What if a prime MMF breaks the buck on credit-paper losses and triggers a run?
A prime institutional MMF's NAV falls below $1 on credit-paper losses, triggering a run reminiscent of Reserve Primary in 2008 and seizing short-term funding.
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 risk-off shock. A prime institutional MMF's NAV falls below $1 on credit-paper losses, triggering a run reminiscent of Reserve Primary in 2008 and seizing short-term funding. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Risk-parity deleveraging ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.