What if Skilled-trades shortage inflates infrastructure and housing build costs?
A shortage of electricians, plumbers and heavy-equipment operators inflates the cost and timelines of infrastructure and housing projects, feeding construction cost inflation; the trades bottleneck pressures builders and lifts blue-collar wages.
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 shortage of electricians, plumbers and heavy-equipment operators inflates the cost and timelines of infrastructure and housing projects, feeding construction cost inflation; the trades bottleneck pressures builders and lifts blue-collar wages. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Consumer spending ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Labor shortage ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.