What if Chinese smelters idle on negative margins, refined copper squeeze?
Sustained negative TC/RCs force coordinated Chinese smelter maintenance shutdowns; refined copper availability drops sharply and the cash-3M spread flips to backwardation.
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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 1–3 years 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. Sustained negative TC/RCs force coordinated Chinese smelter maintenance shutdowns; refined copper availability drops sharply and the cash-3M spread flips to backwardation. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Copper ▲ · China growth ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.