What if the Red Sea needs naval convoys to move trade?
A formal carrier-escort convoy through Bab-el-Mandeb institutionalizes Red Sea risk, doubling costs and keeping a structural Brent premium plus a heavy VIX bid as the disruption becomes permanent rather than reroute-able. Rhymes with the 1980s Tanker War convoy operations and the 2024 Houthi campaign that pushed most boxships to the Cape. Europe-Asia trade and Egypt's canal revenue are most hit; the forward angle is convoys signal a multi-quarter regime, so unlike a one-off grounding the freight/insurance premium is sticky.
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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 Imminent 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. Sustained missile fire forces a formal naval carrier-escort convoy system through Bab-el-Mandeb, replacing reroutes and doubling Red Sea costs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.