Acting Before Knowing: Information Fields in Supply-Network Shocks

Could a Strait of Hormuz-centered disruption become large enough to approach a global depression shock? This working paper treats that question as a counterfactual threshold problem, not as a forecast. It does not estimate the probability of closure, assign a calibrated GDP loss, or infer depression-scale damage from oil prices alone. Instead, it asks what would have to be jointly true for a Hormuz-centered disruption to approach a 10% global GDP level shortfall relative to a no-shock baseline over a multi-year horizon. The paper argues that a short oil-price shock is not enough. A persistent Hormuz failure would be severe, but depression-scale loss would require a compound alternate world: durable energy non-arrival, material Russian crude or gas disruption, constrained LNG, fertilizer and sulfur stress, refined-fuel shortages, shipping-insurance and credit impairment, industrial curtailment, food-system pass-through, and weak recovery. Building on availability-constrained GDP and operational-to-macro shock translation, the paper develops a qualitative S0–S4 threshold ladder from price-mediated disruption to global depression threshold bundle. The contribution is not a prediction of crisis. It is a disciplined method for making an extreme macroeconomic claim inspectable before it is modeled, cited, or repeated.