Economic ripple effects

Eve has a really interesting thing occurring and I wonder if there's a reasonable real world corollary. I'll try to stay away from EVE specific verbiage because I think there's applicability for a wider application.

Up until last month, there was a specific resource that was heavily localized (Technetium) such that it had come under a strong cartel (both a military cartel and economic cartel as I understand it). This kept the price very, very high (this one material was contributing almost 50% of a ship's price, IIRC). The game designers felt this was unbalanced and made a change. The alteration was to introduce "alchemy" that could be used to convert another mineral (a more common one) into the rare one. Thus increasing supply greatly but doing so somewhat inefficiently so that there was a soft-cap on the price (or at least a cap on the ratio BETWEEN the two minerals).

The result is, somewhat predictably that mineral A (Technetium) has fallen and mineral B (Cobalt) has risen.

Here's where things get interesting.

Because of way ship construction works, each of the four "nations" has a specific alloy that they use in all of their advanced ships. Only ONE of these uses Cobalt (the nation called "Gallente"). As a result, the rise in the substitute mineral's value has hit that nation's ships harder than it would have hit other people.

It would be as if, in an effort to fight high Petroleum costs and break up OPEC, someone figured out a way to make oil out of Iron. But Japan is the only country in the world that makes cars out of Iron. So the OPEC breaking solution is also a (smallish?) tax on the Japanese people.

It's an interesting thing that's happening... Can anyone think of a real world corollary?

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