What if the US President is assassinated?
A presidential assassination is a maximal political-uncertainty tail: VIX explodes, Nasdaq and high-beta gap down, credit widens, and vol-target funds force-sell into the move. Historical analogue is the JFK assassination (Nov 1963), when the NYSE halted and equities fell ~3% intraday before recovering within days once succession was orderly. Forward angle: constitutional continuity (25th Amendment) historically caps the duration, so the trade is to fade the vol spike once succession clears — but a contested or violent transfer would invalidate that mean-reversion.
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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 Tail risk 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. The US President is assassinated, triggering a constitutional succession and a market panic. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.