What if VLCC tanker day-rates explode to record highs?
A scrubber-retrofit plus sanctions squeeze on compliant tonnage sends VLCC day-rates to records, raising delivered-crude costs and supporting Brent over WTI. This rhymes with the late-2019 COSCO-sanctions VLCC spike, when rates briefly exploded above $100k/day and lifted landed oil costs. Skeptical note: a pure freight squeeze is a cost/logistics event, not a 'war premium' — crude upside is real but smaller than the supply-outage scenarios it's grouped with.
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. A scrubber-retrofit and sanctions squeeze on compliant tonnage sends VLCC day-rates to record highs. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Oil supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.