What if China and Japan restrict photoresists and neon gas essential to chip lithography?
China and Japan restrict photoresists, neon gas and specialty chemicals essential to lithography, replaying the 2019 Japan–Korea dispute and the Ukraine-war neon squeeze at larger scale.
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 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 risk-off shock. China and Japan restrict photoresists, neon gas and specialty chemicals essential to lithography, replaying the 2019 Japan–Korea dispute and the Ukraine-war neon squeeze at larger scale. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.