What if quantitative tightening drains reserves too low and forces the Fed to reverse course?
Quantitative tightening drains reserves below the ample threshold, spiking funding rates and forcing the Fed to halt QT and resume reserve-management purchases.
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. Quantitative tightening drains reserves below the ample threshold, spiking funding rates and forcing the Fed to halt QT and resume reserve-management purchases. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Fed policy path ▼ · Financial conditions ▲ · Real yields ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.