What if China's dominance of lithium refining becomes a chokepoint for non-Chinese battery makers?
China's dominance of lithium chemical refining becomes a chokepoint as it prioritises domestic supply or restricts exports, starving non-Chinese battery makers of refined lithium, an IEA midstream-concentration risk.
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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 risk-off shock. China's dominance of lithium chemical refining becomes a chokepoint as it prioritises domestic supply or restricts exports, starving non-Chinese battery makers of refined lithium, an IEA midstream-concentration risk. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Geopolitical risk ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Inflation surprise ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.