How world signals turn into a US-Impact number
The engine reads 9 base signals (the same ones driving the Doomsday Clock), weights them by historical pass-through to US homeland metrics, and applies a region-risk multiplier. The card on the right shows each signal's contribution to today's score.
Per-signal contribution
Doomsday contribution
The US-Impact Index is one of 10 weighted streams feeding the clock (12% of composite). Right now it is moving the needle by roughly:
Top scenarios driven by US-Impact
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Signal flow — from world to homeland
1. World signals
- conflict
- cyber
- military
- politics
- markets
2. Pass-through
- oil & gas
- shipping & ports
- FX / treasuries
- cyber-spillover
- supply chains
3. US-Impact channels
- CPI re-acceleration
- retail price shocks
- grid / banking risk
- job-market drag
- capital outflows
Iran / Hormuz oil-shock what-if
A live demo of one of the engine's formula patterns: P_t = P_0 + k·R_t + M_t — Brent price as a function of base price, regional risk index, and event multipliers (closure days). Drag the sliders to see the propagation through US gasoline and CPI.
Iran-conflict oil shock → US homeland
How the engine actually computes the index (formulas + sources)
The US-Impact Index is a weighted composite of nine base signals, scaled into the 0–100 range, with a region-risk multiplier applied. The same formula pattern is used to feed the Doomsday Clock:
USImpact = clamp( Σ w_k · signal_k · (1 + regionMultiplier), 0, 100 )
Weights
- conflict 0.18 — Reuters / BBC / AP / Al Jazeera / ISW / ReliefWeb conflict article tempo
- cyber 0.16 — CISA KEV / Feodo / SSLBL / URLHaus indicators
- military 0.13 — Defense News / ISW troop redeployment + naval positioning
- politics 0.13 — election volatility, sanctions, alliance shifts
- markets 0.12 — top-25 crypto + macro volatility
- ai 0.10 — frontier-lab release tempo, capability jumps
- health 0.08 — CDC / WHO outbreak news, hospitalization signals
- disaster 0.06 — USGS M4.5+ + GDACS UN/EU alerts
- space 0.04 — ISS, satellite, nuclear-test, NK launch detection
Pass-through formula patterns
Four canonical patterns wire base signals into US homeland metrics:
- Oil pass-through —
P_t = P_0 + k·R_t + M_t— Brent as base + regional risk + event multipliers (closure days). - Sentiment regression — Fed-Greenbook tonality regressed against headline tonality clusters from Reuters/BBC/AP.
- Trade pass-through — GTAP-style elasticities mapping foreign-supply shocks to US import-price indices.
- Cyber spillover — CISA KEV velocity × geopolitical-tension scalar → expected retaliatory-incident probability on US infrastructure.
Region-risk multiplier
Currently a conflict-driven proxy (1 + clamp((conflict-50)/200, -0.1, 0.25)). The roadmap is to swap this for a per-country GPR feed (Iacoviello + ACLED) covering Iran, China, Russia, EU, LATAM and rolling them up into a weighted region-risk vector. See /regions.html.
Where this number lives
The world-state strip at the top of every page reads from the same engine that computes this dial. The Doomsday Clock pulls US-Impact as a 10th signal with a 12% weight. Per-state and per-country pages (/regions.html) all surface the index alongside their region-specific risk vector.
Legal & historical context
The engine's politics + cyber + conflict signals plug directly into legal-event channels. Live counts from the civic-data backbone:
Historical events
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Indiana OD deaths
Read with epistemic humility. The engine is a real-time tempo model, not a prophecy. It is most useful as a fast cross-check on whether headline drama corresponds to actual signal-level escalation.