What if a Vanke default cascades through China's property sector?
Vanke is China's largest surviving mixed-ownership developer; a hard default after Shenzhen Metro caps support freezes the marginal private-developer bid and re-prices completion risk into household savings. Copper and AUD lead the real-economy read (China is ~55% of copper demand) while China-internet/Alibaba take the equity hit. Rhymes with Evergrande/Kaisa offshore defaults (2021), which knocked iron ore ~25% and froze HY property dollar bonds. Forward angle: unlike 2021, SOE-anchored ownership means Beijing eats it via AMCs rather than a clean offshore restructuring — contagion is more onshore-credit than dollar-bond.
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 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. Vanke exhausts bond extensions and defaults after Shenzhen Metro caps aid, freezing funding for surviving private developers and reigniting nationwide presales-completion panic. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Credit spreads ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.