What if a refrigerant shortage breaks the cold chain?
A refrigerant/compressor crunch raises cold-chain costs and perishable spoilage — a logistics-margin and food-waste story, not a crop-yield shock, so the wheat/corn framing is wrong-axis even if directionally inflationary. Rhymes with the 2021 semiconductor/compressor and HFC-phasedown squeezes that lifted appliance and cold-chain costs. Transmission is diffuse global food-retail margins; this is a low-conviction, small-magnitude scenario better tagged to food inflation than grains.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. A refrigerant and compressor supply crunch cripples cold-chain logistics, causing mass spoilage of perishable food exports. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Food inflation ▲ · Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move |
|---|
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Volatility VIX | LONG | +3.5% · 5d +0.8% | 61% | 33 | 0.19 | · |
| Gold XAU | LONG | +0.6% · 5d -0.3% ↺ fades | 58% | 33 | 0.14 | · |
| 10y yield DGS10 | SHORT | 0bp · 5d +1bp ↺ fades | 56% | 40 | 0.12 | · |
| US dollar DXY | SHORT | -0.1% · 5d +0.0% ↺ fades | 54% | 40 | 0.07 | · |
| Bitcoin BTC | LONG | +3.3% · 5d -0.6% ↺ fades | 53% | 32 | 0.05 | · |
| High-yield credit HYG | LONG | +0.3% · 5d +0.2% | 50% | 33 | 0.00 | · |
Why this probability
Global refrigerant/cold-chain crippling causing mass export spoilage is novel; no real precedent. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.