What if US sanctions block Venezuela's $5.9bn Citgo sale?
An OFAC block stranding the $5.9bn Citgo sale is a defaulted-bondholder recovery event (PDVSA-2020, the 8.5% notes secured on Citgo) — trade the distressed recovery curve, not macro oil. The relevant history is the multi-year Citgo auction litigation in Delaware, a creditor-recovery saga, not a supply shock. Venezuela's barrels are already largely off the seaborne market, so the cascade's Brent +1.8%/VIX +4.1% war-premium framing is unfounded. This is idiosyncratic credit, with negligible global-equity or crude transmission.
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. Maduro's appeal or an OFAC license lapse freezes the approved $5.9bn Citgo sale, stranding PDVSA-2020 bondholder distributions. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Credit spreads ▲ · EM currencies ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.