What if a missed Eskom payment infects South Africa's sovereign debt?
A missed Eskom guaranteed-debt payment is the contagion trigger that hits the sovereign directly — SOAF CDS and ZAR bond yields gap because the state explicitly backstops the utility. Rhymes with Eskom's 2019-23 bailout cycles that repeatedly threatened the rating. SA's bondholders are global EM funds; the forward angle is that with guarantees already drawn, a true miss removes the implicit-support premium markets have long assumed away.
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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 0–6 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. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A missed Eskom guaranteed-debt payment cascades to the sovereign, spiking SOAF CDS and rand bond yields. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Recession signal ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.