Central Banks & Macro risk-off · 6–18 months
A what‑if from the future

What if Sri Lanka relapses into default?

Post-restructuring Sri Lanka sliding back toward default as tourism/remittance recovery stalls spooks frontier creditors: short Sri Lankan dollar bonds and frontier credit risk; the small global cascade is correctly sized. Rhymes directly with Sri Lanka's own 2022 default — a tourism/remittance-dependent BoP that cracked once external buffers thinned. Transmission stays within frontier EM credit. Forward: a relapse so soon after the 2023-24 restructuring would chill the entire frontier-debt asset class, raising new-issue premia for peers far more than the standalone size implies.

14%
our model probability
over 6–18 months
prediction markets — the market's odds
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Anchored to measured history 14% · 90% range 2–26% · 26 dated precedents behind it — a wider range means thinner evidence

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 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. Loading the probability audit trail…

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What it would mean

If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Post-restructuring Sri Lanka stumbles back toward default as tourism and remittance recovery stalls, spooking frontier creditors. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Growth surprise ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.

Methodology. Probability and impact are anchored to history and scored against what actually happens — wins and losses, in public, at Reality Check. Market odds live from Polymarket & Kalshi. By Vikas Singh, Quantitative Strategist. Updated 2026-08-13.