What if chipmaking export controls widen to mature-node tools?
Extending litho bans to mature-node tools and servicing strands China fabs and craters equipment-maker backlog — a combined export-control plus trade-war shock, so it hits ASML, the semi complex, the Nasdaq, the yuan and Alibaba together. Rhymes with the Oct-2022/2023 US-Netherlands-Japan tool-export controls that wiped equipment-order visibility. Forward angle: servicing bans on installed base are the novel escalation — they degrade existing China capacity, inviting sharper rare-earth/retaliation, the real second-order tail.
Every number ships with its receipt — the odds, the range, the precedents, and a public grade at Reality Check. The statistical machinery that produces it is proprietary.
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. Allied governments extend bans to mature-node tools and servicing, stranding China fabs and hammering equipment makers' backlog. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Semiconductor supply risk ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.