What if Saudi Arabia starts pricing its oil off the dollar?
A Gulf central bank settling oil/reserves partly in renminbi is a slow erosion of dollar invoicing: the structural trade is long gold and the long-end term premium and short the dollar as reserve managers diversify. Rhymes with the post-2022 reserve-weaponization shift that structurally bid gold and central-bank buying. Saudi sells oil to China and recycles into Treasuries; partial de-dollarization loosens that recycling. Forward: this is a multi-year grind, not a 2022-style gap — gold's central-bank bid is the durable expression, not a Treasury crash.
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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 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 Gulf central bank begins settling reserves and oil partly in renminbi, accelerating a slow erosion of dollar invoicing dominance. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.