What if the Korean won breaks past 1,650 to the dollar?
USDKRW through 1650 on capital flight squeezes dollar-funded chaebols and KEPCO's import bill: the trade is short the won and Korea-sensitive risk as outflows accelerate, with global high-beta (SOL, Nasdaq) catching the de-risking. Rhymes with the 1997-98 won crisis and the Oct-2022 ~1440 stress, both of which forced FX-defense and authorities' jawboning. Transmission: a weak won lifts Korean importers' costs and pressures the semi supply chain. Forward: record corporate dollar debt makes 1650 more solvency-threatening than 2022's level.
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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 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. USDKRW pierces 1650 on accelerating capital outflows, its weakest since the 1998 crisis, squeezing KEPCO and dollar-funded chaebols. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — FX carry appetite ▼ · Financial conditions ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.