What if a major economy enacts universal basic income?
UBI funded into an automation backdrop is a fiscal-reflation signal: breakevens and the nominal-real wedge widen, the long end cheapens, and the Fed leans against rising inflation expectations. Closest analogue is the 2021 stimulus-cheque inflation impulse that lifted breakevens and steepened the curve. Forward angle: the deflationary automation force partly offsets the inflationary transfer, so the net rate move is smaller and slower than a pure helicopter-money episode — a 3-10y theme, not a tradable shock.
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 3–10 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. A major economy enacts Universal Basic Income in response to automation-driven displacement. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Job displacement ▲ · Inflation expectations ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.