What if a global moratorium kills deep-sea mining?
A binding seabed moratorium kills nickel-cobalt projects, reinforcing terrestrial/recycled reliance — mildly supportive for land miners like Freeport; the Nasdaq/semis/yuan trade-war chain the roots pull in is spurious here. Rhymes with the 2023 EU/Pacific moratorium push that briefly firmed land-nickel sentiment. Transmission favors Indonesian nickel and DRC cobalt incumbents. Forward: removes a supply-glut tail risk, so it's a slow structural floor under battery-metal pricing rather than any tradable shock.
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 mixed shock. A binding international moratorium kills seabed nickel-cobalt projects, reinforcing reliance on terrestrial and recycled supply. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.