What if the Teamsters strike over Amazon's warehouse robots?
A Teamsters strike against Amazon robotics during peak season is a labor-action/cost shock — same-day delivery costs spike and AMZN margins compress; the read is idiosyncratic, not market-wide. Rhymes with the 2023 UPS-Teamsters showdown and the 2024 East-Coast port (ILA) strike, both of which threatened freight costs but settled without lasting index damage. The automation_displacement root over-weights a tech-beneficiary read on what is really a labor-disruption event.
how we built this number — every step
The class rate is measured from our dated, sourced event library (decade-normalized Poisson — the full table is public at base_rates.json). The variant’s share within its class is the analyst’s editorial call, published so you can audit it. A wider range means thinner precedent. Full recipe: methodology · scored at Reality Check.
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 (gold) over time vs the crowd's (Polymarket, blue), from the past toward the 0–6 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. The gold path is an illustrative reconstruction anchored to today's estimate — real dated events, not a live re-estimate history.
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a mixed shock. Teamsters launch nationwide strike as Amazon deploys Sequoia robots, halting peak-season shipments and spiking same-day delivery costs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Labor shortage ▲ · Job displacement ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.
If it happens — the markets it would move
Biggest moves first. Projected moves are cascade-model priors; hist A–B% = what comparable past events actually did (measured abnormal returns), and model prior · unmeasured marks markets with no analogue backing yet. Tap any market for its price history.
| Market | Class | Projected move |
|---|
Historical precedent — what analogous events actually did
Across 40 analogous events (overlap‑weighted), as abnormal returns — market beta stripped, so it's the event's own effect, not the market backdrop. Shown at 20 days (persistent) and 5 days (immediate); ↺ fades = the two horizons disagree. Confidence = consistency × sample × significance.
| Asset | History says | Abnormal (20d · 5d) | Hit | n | Confidence | vs cascade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10y yield DGS10 | LONG | +7bp · 5d +2bp | 61% | 40 | 0.18 | · |
| Gold XAU | LONG | +0.4% · 5d -0.5% ↺ fades | 59% | 40 | 0.14 | · |
| High-yield credit HYG | SHORT | -0.1% · 5d +-0.0% | 54% | 40 | 0.06 | · |
| Volatility VIX | LONG | +0.8% · 5d -0.1% ↺ fades | 49% | 40 | 0.00 | · |
| US dollar DXY | LONG | +0.1% · 5d -0.1% ↺ fades | 44% | 40 | 0.00 | · |
| Bitcoin BTC | LONG | +1.3% · 5d -2.5% ↺ fades | 49% | 40 | 0.00 | · |
Why this probability
Teamsters-Amazon friction real, but a nationwide strike halting peak in 6mo is high-bar; Amazon largely non-union still. A base‑rate‑anchored prior, continuously scored against what actually happens — not a forecast.