The Escalator You Signed, and the One That Pays

How to read this sheet

The four term costs are independent sensitivities - each is what removing that one term alone would have been worth - and they deliberately do not add up to the shortfall. They interact, sometimes strongly: on the seeded contract, removing the lag lets the index run higher and the cap then bites harder, so the two cannot simply be summed. Any split that reconciled exactly would be an allocation convention invented here, and the question a negotiator actually has is which single sentence to reopen. Whatever is left after all four is the basis, and no clause term recovers it: the index is a market and you buy a growth, a staple, a grade and a delivery point, and the differential between them moves on its own. If the basis is the largest part of your shortfall the answer is not a better clause but a different index, or a formula written on your own purchase records. This is a backward look and its honesty comes entirely from using real history: run it on the period that hurt and on a period that did not, because a clause that recovers well in a rising market can pay out against you in a falling one, and a cap is symmetric on this sheet whether or not your contract says so. Nothing here prices the commercial reality that a supplier who wins every clause argument may lose the account, that the buyer conceded something elsewhere for these terms, or that an unindexed contract at a higher base price might have been the better trade all along.