What if the US and China strike a sweeping trade détente?
Tariff-rollback risk-on: a US-China detente lifts the most tariff-exposed names — semis, Nasdaq, China megacaps (BABA) — and bids the yuan as trade-war drag lifts. Rhyme is the Jan-2020 Phase One signing, which rallied semis and CNY before COVID overwhelmed it. Transmission: China is the export hub and bears the adjustment via CNY, while US tech reclaims supply-chain certainty; forward angle — tariffs are now structurally higher post-2025 100%+ peak, so a 'comprehensive' rollback is a bigger positive surprise than 2019-20, but credibility/durability is the catch — fade if it's a truce, not a treaty.
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-on shock. The US and China announce a comprehensive trade détente and tariff rollback. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▼ · China growth ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.