What if Texas puts secession to a ballot measure?
A Texas secession ballot is a reserve-confidence tail: union-fracture risk lifts long-end Treasury yields and gold while the dollar wobbles, even though actual secession is near-impossible. There is no clean US analogue; the nearest rhyme is foreign fragmentation premia (Brexit/Catalonia) or US debt-ceiling brinkmanship (2011 S&P downgrade lifted gold). The skeptical read: this stays a headline, not a price event — any spasm in 30y yields is a fade.
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. Texas legislature schedules independence referendum, dollar and Treasuries wobble on union-fracture tail risk. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Dollar/reserve confidence ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.