What if China reinstates a full gallium and germanium ban?
If China lets the gallium/germanium suspension lapse and fully bans exports, Western fiber, radar and GaN/GaAs substrate makers (II-VI/Coherent, Wolfspeed) face a hard input cliff and prices spike - this is a genuine tail with VIX bid. Rhymes with China's 2023 Ga/Ge licensing and the April-2025 rare-earth retaliation. China is ~98% of gallium output; the forward angle is the West has had two years to stockpile since 2023, so the price spike may exceed the volume disruption - a squeeze, not a permanent shortage.
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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 lets the suspension lapse after November 2026 and fully bans gallium and germanium exports, crippling Western fiber, radar, and substrates. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.