What if a China slowdown craters iron ore, copper and coal?
A hard China investment slowdown craters iron ore and copper, so the trade is short bulk/base-metal miners and AUD as the China proxy — Freeport -2.3% and AUD lower is the right spine. Rhymes with the 2015 China hard-landing scare that sent iron ore under $40 and battered BHP/Rio and the Aussie. Transmission: Australia (iron ore), Brazil (Vale) and Chile (copper) take the terms-of-trade hit as China is ~55% of copper and the marginal iron-ore buyer. Forward angle: Beijing's reluctance to re-lever property this cycle means the usual stimulus rescue for metals may not arrive.
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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 6–18 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 mixed shock. A hard Chinese investment slowdown craters iron ore, copper and coal, hammering Australia, Brazil and Chile terms of trade. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▼ · China growth ▼ · Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.