What if cocoa and coffee crop failures spiked food inflation?
Cocoa/coffee crop failures spike soft commodities and add a salient food-CPI headline, but the channel is crop-specific (West African cocoa, Brazil/Vietnam coffee) rather than the grain complex the cascade defaults to. The defining rhyme is the 2024 cocoa squeeze that tripled prices to ~$12k/t on Ivory Coast/Ghana disease and weather. Forward angle: softs are inelastic and concentrated, so the price move is violent but the macro/inflation-expectations spillover is small — this is a contained commodity trade, not a broad inflation regime shift.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), from the past toward the 6–18 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Cocoa/coffee crop failures spike soft commodities and food inflation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Climate/crop supply ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Wheat WHEATon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +1.3% hist +0.3–+1.13% |
| 2 | Corn CORNon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +1.2% hist +0.22–+1.11% |
| 3 | Semiconductors SMHon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.3% hist -0.22–-0.09% |
| 4 | Natural gas NGon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Commodity | ▲ +0.3% hist -2.1–+4.93% |
| 5 | Nvidia NVDAon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -1.06–+0.32% |
| 6 | AMD AMDon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -0.79–+0.16% |
| 7 | Broadcom AVGOon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -0.21–+0.1% |
| 8 | Micron MUon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -2.33–+1.03% |
| 9 | TSMC TSMon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -1.3–+0.31% |
| 10 | Marvell MRVLon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -1.8–+0.77% |
| 11 | ASML ASMLon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.2% hist -1.91–+0.72% |
| 12 | Qualcomm QCOMon Hyperliquid 📈 chart | Equity | ▼ -0.1% hist -4.68–+1.41% |
Probable recommendation
Why we may diverge from history
Trust the cascade: NG and WHEAT's negative means are contaminated by off-channel gold-squeeze and H5N1 egg windows unrelated to cocoa/coffee crop failure — the soft-commodity channel never fired in those analogues.
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| TSM TSM | SHORT | -1.1% · 5d -2.3% | 62% | 39 | 0.21 | ✓ matches cascade |
| QCOM QCOM | SHORT | -4.2% · 5d -2.7% | 62% | 39 | 0.20 | ✓ matches cascade |
| AMD AMD | SHORT | -0.6% · 5d -3.0% | 62% | 40 | 0.19 | ✓ matches cascade |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +0.1% · 5d +0.2% | 57% | 40 | 0.12 | · |
| Gold XAU | LONG | +0.3% · 5d -0.9% ↺ fades | 55% | 39 | 0.09 | · |
| NVDA NVDA | SHORT | -0.9% · 5d -4.3% | 55% | 39 | 0.07 | ✓ matches cascade |
| ASML ASML | SHORT | -1.7% · 5d -3.5% | 55% | 39 | 0.07 | ✓ matches cascade |
| CORN CORN | LONG | +0.4% · 5d -0.6% ↺ fades | 53% | 39 | 0.05 | ✓ matches cascade |
| NG NG | LONG | +4.6% · 5d -0.8% ↺ fades | 53% | 39 | 0.05 | ✓ matches cascade |
| WHEAT WHEAT | LONG | +0.3% · 5d +0.1% | 42% | 39 | 0.00 | ✓ matches cascade |
| SMH SMH | SHORT | -0.0% · 5d -1.9% | 50% | 39 | 0.00 | ✓ matches cascade |
| AVGO AVGO | LONG | +0.2% · 5d -3.1% ↺ fades | 47% | 39 | 0.00 | ⚠ differs |
| MU MU | SHORT | -2.2% · 5d -3.3% | 48% | 40 | 0.00 | ✓ matches cascade |
| MRVL MRVL | SHORT | -1.6% · 5d -2.9% | 47% | 39 | 0.00 | ✓ matches cascade |
Why this probability
Cocoa/coffee failures recurrent and recent; soft-commodity spikes a live risk. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.