What if a major spiritual leader is assassinated?
A major spiritual leader's assassination sparks broad unrest and a reflexive risk-off: VIX rises, high-beta and crypto sell, credit widens modestly. There is no clean financial analogue — religious-figure shocks (e.g. the 1981 papal attempt) had negligible market impact, so the cascade's vol magnitude is likely overstated for asset prices. Forward angle: the real transmission is region-specific (the leader's home market and connected diaspora economies) rather than global beta — this is more a localized geopolitical-risk event than a systemic one; fade the broad-index leg.
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 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 major global spiritual leader is assassinated, sparking widespread unrest. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.