What if the PBOC lets the yuan break past 7.60?
PBOC abandoning the fix and letting USDCNY break 7.60 triggers Asia-wide competitive-devaluation fear: semis and China megacaps (Alibaba, TSMC, Nvidia via supply chain) lead lower, copper softens, the yuan and EM-Asia FX slide together. This is the Aug-2015 surprise devaluation and Aug-2019 'break 7 / manipulator' playbook, both of which sparked global risk-off. Forward angle: a deliberate float now reads as a trade-war weapon amid tariffs, so the reaction is more about retaliation risk than the FX level itself.
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. PBOC abandons the daily fix defense and lets USDCNY blow past 7.60, triggering Asia-wide competitive devaluation fears. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — China growth ▼ · Risk appetite ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.