What if a critical-minerals crunch squeezed battery makers?
A lithium/critical-minerals crunch raises battery input costs and squeezes EV/cell makers' margins, but the macro footprint is narrow and the copper-miner read-through (Freeport) is only a loose proxy. Rhymes with the 2022 lithium spike to ~$80k/t that compressed automaker EV economics before the 2023-24 glut crashed prices. Forward angle: lithium is structurally oversupplied near-term, so a 'crunch' likely reflects a specific chokepoint (China processing, a single brine/mine) — trade the named bottleneck and ex-China refiners, not a broad commodity beta.
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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 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 lithium/critical-minerals supply crunch hits EV and battery makers. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.