What if the US makes its universal tariff baseline permanent?
A permanent above-10% universal baseline reprices every import contract, so this is a broad stagflation impulse - higher goods CPI plus a growth drag - hitting margins market-wide, with the China-centric cascade understating the breadth. Rhymes with the April 2025 Liberation Day repricing that knocked ~10% off the S&P in days before the pause. As a universal measure it hits all partners (EU, Mexico, Vietnam, China) at once; the forward angle is that permanence removes the negotiation optionality that rescued the 2025 selloff.
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 6–18 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. Congress makes the Section 122 surcharge permanent and lifts the universal baseline above 10%, repricing every supplier contract. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.