What if China's trust giants freeze $200bn of redemptions?
A Zhongrong-style trust freeze on ~$200bn hits HNW household wealth and consumption through the shadow-banking channel: HY and China-demand proxies (copper, China internet) lead lower, VIX and global risk-off follow. This is the 2023 Zhongrong/Zhongzhi missed-payment episode almost literally, itself an echo of the 2014 trust near-defaults. Forward angle: trust losses hit exactly the high-savings consumers Beijing needs to spend, so the second-order consumption hit (luxury, autos, travel) outlasts the credit headline.
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 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. Loading the probability audit trail…
What it would mean
If this plays out, it is a risk-off shock. Zhongrong-style trust giants suspend redemptions on $200bn of products, hitting high-net-worth households and consumption. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Credit spreads ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.