What if Myanmar's rare-earth mines collapse in the civil war?
Kachin flooding shutting Myanmar's heavy-rare-earth mines that feed China's separation plants spikes dysprosium and terbium — the move is HREE magnet-input prices and defense/EV-motor costs higher; the TSMC/ASML semis cascade is the wrong channel since HREEs go into magnets, not chips. Rhymes with the 2023-24 Myanmar supply disruptions that lifted Dy/Tb and the 2010 China rare-earth embargo. Forward angle: Myanmar supplies ~half of China's heavy-REE feed, so this paradoxically tightens China's own magnet output — the squeeze hits magnet buyers (autos, wind, defense) globally; MP Materials/Lynas equities are the beneficiaries.
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 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. Civil-war flooding shuts Kachin heavy-rare-earth mines that feed China's separation plants, spiking dysprosium and terbium. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Trade tension ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.