What if a budget standstill triggers a run on South Africa's rand?
A blocked GNU budget pushing the rand past 22 and foreigners out of SAGBs is a local-rates and ZAR event; SA's deep, liquid bond market makes it the cleanest EM-stress proxy, but spillover to US HY is second-order. Rhymes with the Dec-2015 'Nenegate' rand rout. SA funds its twin deficit via portfolio inflows from US/EU real-money; the new wrinkle is GNU coalition fragility replacing single-party fiscal signaling as the swing risk.
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 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 blocked GNU budget triggers a rand rout past 22/USD and a foreign exodus from SAGB bonds. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Recession signal ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.