MEI Chart - Toot Toot the 150,000ppm cobalt train, page-31

More macro shakiness in the US. This will stall the battery metals boom a little while, but won't hold it back.

For instance, the EU/Germany is starting to regret backing diesel fueled passenger vehicles. From the economist Bill Mitchell's remarks on Trump's tariffs:
"Wolfgang Münchau’s latest Financial Times article (March 18, 2018) – In a trade war Germany is the weakest link – makes two really apposite points here.
1. “the ongoing collapse in the sale of diesel cars”, which the “German car industry placed a heavy bet on” and “invested in the wrong technologies for too long”, is a major threat to the German export machine.
2. “it is utter madness for the EU to have allowed itself to become so dependent on the export of a late-lifecycle product. Its entire business model turns out to have been based on the bet that Mr Trump would not become US president, that there would be no Brexit, and that you could cheat on emissions targets forever.”

It's not hard to see a rapid changeover to the new paradigm of electric vehicles occurring in the heart of European manufacture, especially with the threat of strong competition from East Asia. That's already happening in the case of VW, as we know, but the supply of basic metals are still a question mark.