What if America's freight railways grind to a halt in a national strike?
A US national freight-rail strike is a stagflationary supply-chain trade: halted coal, grain and chemical shipments idle plants, lifting goods inflation and PPI even as growth dents. Direct analogue is the Sept-2022 near-miss (Congress imposed a deal to avert it) and the 1992 two-day shutdown. The forward angle: chemicals/agriculture move ~30% by rail with no quick substitute, so the inflation leg here is correct and the under-modeled risk is freight/diesel cost spillover.
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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 0–6 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. Freight rail unions strike nationwide, halting coal, grain and chemical shipments, manufacturers idle plants. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Growth surprise ▼ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.