What if Rhine low-water shock chokes European grain and diesel barges?
A hot, dry summer drops Rhine levels below navigation thresholds, stranding grain, coal and diesel barges and spiking inland European freight and prices.
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 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. 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 hot, dry summer drops Rhine levels below navigation thresholds, stranding grain, coal and diesel barges and spiking inland European freight and prices. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ · Diesel ▲ · European energy ▲ · Food inflation ▲ — 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 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wheat WHEATon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +0.4% hist -0.56–+0.61% · other way -0.51% (n=12) |
| 2 | Corn CORNon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +0.3% hist -2.72–+2.12% · other way +4.33% (n=12) |
Probable recommendation
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 29 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 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| High-yield credit HYG | SHORT | -0.2% · 5d +0.1% ↺ fades | 64% | 14 | 0.20 | · |
| Bitcoin BTC | LONG | +8.9% · 5d +3.2% | 62% | 8 | 0.19 | · |
| Volatility VIX | SHORT | -3.3% · 5d -2.0% | 59% | 17 | 0.13 | · |
| WHEAT WHEAT | SHORT | -0.8% · 5d -1.5% | 56% | 16 | 0.12 | ⚠ differs |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +0.3% · 5d -0.0% ↺ fades | 54% | 29 | 0.07 | · |
| 10y yield DGS10 | LONG | +5bp · 5d +5bp | 51% | 29 | 0.02 | · |
| CORN CORN | SHORT | -3.1% · 5d -2.6% | 44% | 16 | 0.00 | ⚠ differs |
| Gold XAU | SHORT | -1.2% · 5d +0.1% ↺ fades | 50% | 16 | 0.00 | · |