What if the administration purges the press corps' credentials?
A US press-credential purge that erodes market-data trust is a vol-premium trade: an information-integrity shock widens the equity risk premium and bids VIX, pressuring high-beta tech and semis. No clean analogue; the rhyme is institutional-trust shocks (the 2024 yen-carry-unwind VIX spike was liquidity, not data-trust, but shows how fast vol gaps). The roots key 'VIX' is invalid vocabulary — the driver is risk appetite plus the resulting vol-target deleveraging.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
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. Administration revokes major outlets' access and sues networks, market-data trust erodes, volatility premium rises. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Risk appetite ▼ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk-parity deleveraging ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.