What if US hospitality-staffing collapse raises services inflation?
Enforcement-driven staffing shortages in restaurants and hotels force wage hikes and service cutbacks, keeping core services inflation sticky; the Fed stays cautious and discretionary equities lag.
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. Enforcement-driven staffing shortages in restaurants and hotels force wage hikes and service cutbacks, keeping core services inflation sticky; the Fed stays cautious and discretionary equities lag. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Consumer spending ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Labor shortage ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.