What if China halted its rare-earth and gallium exports?
A China rare-earth/gallium/germanium halt is the asymmetric retaliation: China dominates refining, so the supply shock hits the entire semi/defense magnet chain that cannot re-source quickly, dragging TSMC and the Nasdaq while the yuan slips. Direct rhyme is the Apr-2025 rare-earth controls bundled with 34% tariffs, and the 2010 China-Japan REE embargo that spiked prices for a year. Forward angle: ex-China processing (MP Materials, Lynas) is the structural long here — the embargo is the catalyst that finally prices Western supply security.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
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 risk-off shock. China retaliates by halting rare-earth and gallium/germanium exports. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▲ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.