What if a shale capital strike freezes US drilling?
A capital-discipline 'shale strike' flattens US supply growth, so the marginal barrel reverts to OPEC+ and Brent firms versus WTI on the spread. This rhymes with 2016-2017, when buyback-focused E&Ps and OPEC cuts let Brent grind from ~$45 to ~$70; it is a slow re-rating, not a spike. Skeptical note: the cascade's 'Strait/war-premium' channel labels are wrong here — this is endogenous supply discipline, not a geopolitical shock, so VIX should not move.
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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. Investor pressure for buybacks freezes US drilling budgets, flattening domestic supply growth. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.