What if China's tier-three ghost cities see prices halve?
A 50% tier-3 price collapse destroys the local-government land-sale revenue model and household wealth simultaneously, a slow-burn demand sink rather than an acute credit event — hence the muted copper/AUD beta and China-internet drag. Closest analogue is the grinding 2014-15 China property destock that fed the August-2015 'Black Monday' growth scare. Transmission: weaker China import demand hits Australian miners and Korean/German exporters. Forward angle: LGFV refinancing, not developer bonds, is the fault line this cycle, so watch onshore credit spreads over offshore HY.
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. Empty third-tier Chinese cities see prices fall 50%, wiping household wealth and crushing local-government land revenue. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Recession signal ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.