What if insurers pull tanker war-risk cover at a key port?
Underwriters pulling war-risk cover for a key load region strands cargoes physically — the cleanest channel is a Brent spike plus a VIX/risk-parity deleveraging cascade as a supply tail prices in. Rhymes with the 2019 Gulf-of-Oman tanker attacks and the 2022 post-invasion war-risk premium blowout, both of which spiked freight and crude. Forward angle: today's larger 'shadow fleet' self-insures outside Western P&I, so a Western cover-pull strands fewer barrels than in 2019 — the oil move may undershoot the model.
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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 Imminent 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. Underwriters pull war-risk cover for a key load region, stranding cargoes and spiking shipping costs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.