What if bank runs cascade across China's rural lenders?
A Henan/Liaoning rural bank-run cascade with frozen withdrawals forces PBOC liquidity and headline risk: financials and China-demand proxies (copper) lead, HY and global high-beta sell off on contagion fear. Rhymes with the 2022 Henan village-bank freeze (depositor protests, health-code abuse) and, behaviorally, 2023 US regional-bank runs. Forward angle: deposits are state-insured and the PBOC has unlimited local-currency firepower, so this is a confidence/headline shock to fade unless it jumps to a systemically-important lender.
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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 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. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Deposit runs spread across Henan and Liaoning small lenders after frozen withdrawals, forcing emergency PBOC liquidity and deposit-freeze headlines. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Credit spreads ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.