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.
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 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.