What if a pipeline cyberattack sparks East Coast fuel shortages?
A pipeline/refinery cyberattack causing East-Coast shortages spikes VIX and fuels (gasoline/diesel cracks) while forcing risk-parity deleveraging that sells high-beta Nasdaq first. The direct analogue is the May-2021 Colonial Pipeline ransomware that drove regional gasoline shortages and a ~6c/gal national spike. Forward angle: crude barely moved in Colonial because the bottleneck was logistics, not barrels — trade the product crack and regional basis, not flat WTI.
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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 pipeline/refinery cyberattack causes US East-Coast fuel shortages. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.