What if the Houthis sink a tanker and close the Suez route?
Suez closure reroutes tankers around the Cape, bidding Brent ~4% and diesel/jet on freight-cost and supply-timing risk while VIX +9 and Nasdaq dips. Direct rhyme is the 2023-24 Houthi campaign — Brent and especially freight/tanker rates jumped, but crude itself stayed contained because barrels reroute rather than disappear. Forward angle: the oil price impact is muted versus the shipping-rate and European-diesel impact, so the cleaner expression is long tanker rates / EU gasoil crack, not outright crude — most of the barrel still reaches market, just later and dearer.
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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 risk-off shock. Houthis sink a major oil tanker in the Red Sea, effectively closing Suez transit. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.