sanyero

• There are very little reasons to abandon the upper hand proprietary Huawei solutions enjoy in China. This is not something Huawei or the Chinese government particularly wants.
• Proprietary solutions are simpler to include in national surveillance programs, and plausible deniability is still something the governments wish to maintain.
• Huawei is seen a point of national pride, and they have been moving towards an even more proprietary direction even in software (HarmonyOS, for example, is almost fully proprietary phone and router OS completely free of any Android code).

• In a reality where AI timelines are short there might be a period where the economical and strategic advantages of having access to strong AI systems becomes extremely clear. This will create a huge incentive to cripple, attack, and disrupt data centers, AI labs, and energy production for all major powers and key elements of compute production chain.
  
• Potential NATO targets are in Germany, Netherlands, and the US.
• Inclusion of rail systems and airports also makes a YES resolution very slightly more likely, as disrupting something like them creates a particularly visible form of chaos which might be something a global power might want when partaking in terror tactics.

• Russia has a history of not respecting ceasefire agreements. Examples with Ukraine here.
• Both Trump and Putin increase global volatility and squeeze Ukraine.
• Current ceasefire treaty terms are very disadvantageous for Ukraine, and clearly advantageous to Russia. It is unclear how big the global backlash would be against Ukraine and against Russia if either of them did not respect the ceasefire, or if a false flag was used to re-instigate the conflict before the end of the ceasefire period.
• The probability mass is probably mostly early in the distribution. Weird that there is an option for exactly 30 days.
• Other global factors might also affect the length of a possible ceasefire--if a conflict breaks out near Russia's borders or China invades Taiwan, Russia might want to revert to a more defensive strategy.

Updating based on the initial Russian response to ceasefire negotiations.

Updating upwards due to ceasefire negotiations and Ukraine signaling willingness to agree to a ceasefire.

Seems unrecoverable in this timeframe.

Extremely unlikely. The entire nation apparatus has been oriented to work around him. This might happen if he gets assassinated, the likelihood of which is most likely less than 1%.

There are no obvious signs of illness, either.

1) EGX 30 decline of at least 30% over one month

Base-rates suggest this is very unlikely. A decline of at least 30% has happened only once, during 2008 financial crisis, and almost happened again in 2020 during COVID. Only an extreme shock might cause a decline of this degree. Perhaps a proxy for this would be a probability of getting invaded, having a significant civil conflict, or a brewing revolution. 1%.

2) Egypt’s inflation reaches 50%

Headline urban inflation rate for a month is very unlikely to hit 50% even in quite unprecedented situations. Historical data shows that this has not happened even once since the year 2000, although historical data also shows rapidly rising rates of inflation. 3%

3) Egypt defaults on external debts

This seems like the most likely out of all the scenarios listed. Egypt's 2024 financial crisis saw external debt going very high, with debt service payments totaling around 42.3 billion USD. This is the largest annual debt payment requirement in the history of the country. Egypt's external debt has grown to around 150+ billion USD, while the nation's cash reserves is around 1/5 of that. Annual debt service is around 25% of total external debt. Debt service exceeds cash reserves, which is an indicator for defaulting.

Emerging markets generally have sizable likelihood of defaulting.

Debt service/GDP ratio is worrisome if >10%, and in this case it is (42 billion USD/396 billion USD = 10.6%).

12%.

All of these together adjusted for overconfidence add up to maybe 13% total risk. My confidence interval for this is 4-18%. Adjusting downwards rapidly as time goes on.

• US threatening to possibly leave NATO has increased European military spending, which makes it a Russian interest to either quickly significantly ramp up the intensity of their military operations (likely difficult), or negotiate an end to the conflict in order to rebuild lost military capabilities to patch vulnerabilities.
• There are some historical precedents where a year-long or longer conflict against an overwhelming opponent has resulted in territorial concessions with relatively high degrees of consent from the underdog (Winter War 1939, Finland vs. Soviet Union).
• Saudi talks on ceasefire with US, Ukraine, and Russia present are approaching (although Ukraine aggression and recent Zelenskyy-Trump discussion performance might make these negotiations volatile).