What if DRC cobalt export quota squeezes the battery chain?
The DRC extends and tightens its cobalt export quota to defend prices, throttling hydroxide shipments and forcing cathode makers to draw down strategic stocks at higher cost.
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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 6–18 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. The DRC extends and tightens its cobalt export quota to defend prices, throttling hydroxide shipments and forcing cathode makers to draw down strategic stocks at higher cost. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Clean-energy abundance ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Risk appetite ▼ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.