What if a Taiwan crisis freezes access to Chinese bond markets?
A Taiwan crisis freezing access to Chinese bond markets is the semiconductor-supply tail: Nvidia and the whole semis sleeve gap down on TSMC-fab risk, VIX explodes, and risk-parity deleveraging amplifies the equity selloff. Closest real analogue is the August-2015 China devaluation 'Black Monday' rout for the global risk shock, though a true Taiwan event would dwarf it on the chip-supply channel. The transmission is the global semiconductor chokepoint; the forward, novel angle is there is no historical precedent for losing TSMC — the semis drawdown could exceed even the modeled -5.9%.
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 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 Taiwan crisis triggers cross-default fears and frozen access to Chinese sovereign bond markets. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.