What if a coup in a critical-minerals nation chokes supply?
A DRC/Nigeria coup throttles cobalt/critical-mineral supply, but the modeled cascade is only a mild generic risk-off (VIX +5%, Nasdaq -1.8%) since the US equity complex has limited direct mineral exposure — the real squeeze is in battery/EV and cobalt-intensive supply chains, under-expressed here. Rhymes with the 2021-22 cobalt and the 2023 China gallium/germanium export-control spikes, which moved specialty metals far more than broad indices. Transmission: China, the dominant DRC cobalt offtaker and refiner, is the key connected economy and would feel it first.
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. A coup in a major African resource nation (DRC/Nigeria) disrupts critical-mineral supply. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.