What if Schengen unravels as states reimpose border checks?
Schengen border-check reimposition is a freight-cost and labor-mobility tax: a modest EU-growth drag and sticky core inflation, short EU transport/logistics and consumer cyclicals, mildly EUR-negative. The 2015-16 migration-crisis border controls are the rhyme — measurable trucking delays, little market reaction. The cascade is entirely mismapped: it routes an intra-EU logistics friction through TSMC/Nvidia/Alibaba/yuan as if it were a US-China chip war. Real transmission is European supply-chain cost-push, not Asian tech.
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 mixed shock. Multiple states reimpose internal border checks over migration, raising freight costs and labor-mobility frictions. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Global growth ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.