What if a cluster of dead-anchor malls defaults all at once?
A cluster of dead-anchor malls defaulting at once triggers coordinated CMBS special-servicing with ~70% loss severities, pressuring CMBS and the financials holding the paper. Rhymes with the post-2017 retail apocalypse (Sears/JCPenney) and the CMBX.6 'big short' on mall exposure that paid off into 2020. Skeptic's note: this is a long-telegraphed, slow-grind impairment — the cleaner expression is CMBX BBB-/retail tranches, not the broad crypto/Nasdaq cascade shown.
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 1–3 years 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 cluster of dead-anchor malls defaults simultaneously, triggering coordinated CMBS special-servicing and 70% loss severities. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.