What if ransomware shuts down a national hospital network?
A national hospital-chain ransomware strike is a contained operational/credit event for the operator and cyber-insurers, not a market-wide tail — the +5% VIX and risk-parity delever are overstated. Closest real analogue is the 2024 Change Healthcare/UnitedHealth attack, which hammered the issuer and providers but left the S&P unbothered. Trade idiosyncratic credit, not index vol.
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 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 risk-off shock. A coordinated ransomware strike paralyzes a national hospital chain, diverting ambulances and exposing millions of patient records. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.