What if US debt-ceiling brinkmanship near technical default?
A protracted debt-ceiling standoff pushes Treasury to the x-date, spiking bill yields around the default window and volatility; risk appetite drops as money-market plumbing stresses on default-tail pricing.
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. A protracted debt-ceiling standoff pushes Treasury to the x-date, spiking bill yields around the default window and volatility; risk appetite drops as money-market plumbing stresses on default-tail pricing. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Volatility (VIX) ▲ · Credit spreads ▲ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.