What if China launches a full invasion of Taiwan?
A full amphibious assault is the semis tail: losing TSMC's leading-edge node is non-substitutable, so the -6% TSMC / -9% Nasdaq / +20 VIX cascade is directionally right and arguably understates a true fab-destruction scenario. No clean modern analogue; 1990 Iraq/Kuwait oil shock is the nearest war-premium template, but chips lack oil's spare capacity. Transmission: Japan, Korea, and US fabless all seize up. The forward risk is gold and defense names being the only green on the screen.
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. PLA launches amphibious and airborne assault across the strait, triggering US treaty-ambiguity crisis and Pacific war. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.