What if a Western bloc cuts Chinese banks off from SWIFT?
SWIFT expulsion of major Chinese banks forces abrupt CIPS rerouting; the clearest move is the long-end Treasury back-up as Beijing's reserve managers slow UST buying and dollar-clearing trust frays, with gold and BTC bid as non-sovereign hedges. Rhymes with the 2022 Russia reserve freeze, which durably lifted gold and accelerated de-dollarization talk. China funds the US deficit and runs the world's export plumbing; a forced split raises every cross-border importer's settlement cost. Novel angle: CIPS is now deep enough that fragmentation, not collapse, is the base case — long-end term premium, not a USD crash.
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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 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…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. A bloc expels several Chinese banks from SWIFT over sanctions evasion, accelerating CIPS adoption and payment fragmentation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.