What if China embargoes tungsten and bismuth exports?
A hard tungsten/bismuth embargo hits US munitions and carbide tooling, lifting tungsten APT prices and helping ex-China miners (Almonty) and defense primes on supply-security spend - Lockheed +0.7% is directionally right, the broad semis -2.9% less so. Rhymes with China's Feb-2025 tungsten export controls and the 2010 rare-earth embargo on Japan. China dominates tungsten supply; the forward angle is munitions demand is price-inelastic in a rearmament cycle, so this is a defense-industrial cost shock more than an equity-beta event.
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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. China imposes a hard export embargo on tungsten and bismuth, hitting US munitions and hard-metal tooling supply chains. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Trade tension ▲ · Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.