What if the US builds a strategic critical-minerals reserve?
A US strategic-reserve buying spree drains merchant cobalt/REE/gallium inventories, lifting those specialty prices and defense primes (LMT, NOC, RTX) — the dominant channel is defense_spend, so the heavy Nasdaq/Alibaba downside in the cascade is misweighted. Rhymes with US uranium-reserve and 2010-11 REE stockpiling scares that spiked prices without denting big tech. Transmission: China still controls REE refining, so Washington's buying mostly bids ex-China processors (MP Materials). Forward: reserves shrink free float, amplifying the next Chinese export-control shock.
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 mixed shock. Washington funds a strategic reserve and aggressively buys cobalt, rare earths, and gallium, draining merchant inventories. The trigger decomposes into signed root‑shocks — Defense spending ▲ · Industrial demand ▲ · Trade tension ▲ — which propagate through our causal graph to the markets below.