What if a supply glut collapses lithium prices?
A flood of African/Chinese brine supply crushing lithium carbonate ~70% bankrupts marginal hard-rock (Australian spodumene, Albemarle) — the move is lithium equities and producers down, with copper/Freeport a weak negative read-through and the crypto leg noise. Rhymes with the 2023-24 lithium collapse from ~$80k to ~$10k/t CNY that gutted Pilbara and Liontown. Forward angle: oversupply is structural as Chinese lepidolite and African output ramp, so the floor is producer cash-cost capitulation, not demand — short the marginal miners, not the metal's long-run thesis.
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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 mixed shock. A wave of new African and Chinese brine supply crushes lithium carbonate prices seventy percent, bankrupting marginal hard-rock miners. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Industrial demand ▼ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.