What if China fully halts rare-earth magnet exports?
A full rare-earth magnet export halt chokes wind, EV-motor and defense production; CNY weaker and China-exposed equities lower is right, but the -4% TSMC/semis cascade overstates it — magnets are a motor/defense input, only tangential to logic chips. Direct rhyme is China's April-2025 rare-earth export controls that spiked NdPr and rattled autos/defense. Transmission: China controls ~90% of processing, so US/EU motor and missile lines stall. Forward angle: trade MP Materials/Lynas and auto OEMs, not the chip complex.
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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 0–6 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. China lets its paused second-wave controls lapse, fully halting rare-earth magnet exports and choking wind and EV-motor production. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Trade tension ▲ · Geopolitical risk ▲ · Industrial demand ▼ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.