What if a tanker collision closes the Strait of Malacca?
A tanker collision and spill closing Malacca forces Lombok detours on ~16M bbl/day of crude flow - the single largest oil chokepoint after Hormuz - so Brent's +5.4% and the VIX bid are warranted, this is a genuine supply-route tail. Rhymes with Hormuz war-premium episodes (2019 tanker attacks, June-2025 Israel-Iran) more than a normal blockage. China/Japan/Korea are the downstream importers; the forward angle is Lombok adds days but is navigable, so the premium is a timing/insurance spike rather than a barrels-lost shock.
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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 Tail risk 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 laden tanker collision and oil spill closes Malacca lanes, forcing costly Lombok detours for Asian trade. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.