What if Strategic cobalt stockpiling by the US and EU tightens the spot?
Government strategic-reserve purchases of cobalt for defense and EV security pull metal off the market, tightening the spot balance and firming prices despite weak cell demand.
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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. Government strategic-reserve purchases of cobalt for defense and EV security pull metal off the market, tightening the spot balance and firming prices despite weak cell demand. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Clean-energy abundance ▲ · Defense spending ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Risk appetite ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.