Reading this, my initial thoughts are - will this virus be the catalyst that causes a global financial recession.
If you look at the data, the secondary (manufacturing & construction) sector in China has been mostly stagnant. Almost all of their recent growth has come from the tertiary/services sector, which isn't as export focused or tied into the global economy compared to the US or EU.
Manufacturing has been hit - hard, but keep in mind that the quarantines started during the new year holiday, when most factories would be operating at a lower pace or closed entirely. Now that people are actually starting to go back to work (depending on the city, either last week or this week), we'll be able to get a better gauge of the long term effects on industrial production through the end of the crisis.
What's harder to estimate is the impact to services, since it's harder to find solid proxies. A lot of companies are having employees work from home, but not all jobs can be done remotely. There's also the question of whether a significant slowdown here would boil over to the rest of the world.
My guess is that the total damage - assuming a return to normal in the next couple of weeks & that we're only talking about the global economy - will be a lot lower than most people think. A lot of the hit to the secondary sector was already baked in by the Chinese new years, and the tertiary sector isn't as tied in to global markets as the secondary sector. It's also a lot easier to fake #s from services.
It's a different ball game if the status quo doesn't return to something approaching normal soon (e.g., if there's a flare up in cases outside of Hubei now that people are starting to congregate together again). That said, the impact to the local economy is going to be immense anyway, and I wouldn't be surprised if there are follow on effects at some point.
Here’s TomToms real-time traffic congestion map of Shanghai: https://www.tomtom.com/en_gb/traffic-index/shanghai-traffic
Use the 7 day view and compare this week with last year at the same time. Using traffic as a proxy for economic activity and your assertion is clearly a misrepresentation. And Shanghai is not even close to the epicenter!
Remember as well that people leave home for the new year celebrations, and so now a huge chunk of people are locked down to their homes or quarantine hospices far from their places of business, plus probably scared as all get out to leave the house, and your thesis about some quick recovery into normalcy seems basically crazy.
Further, you’re relying on how much China’s growth has impacted the world economy in the last few years, and you’re right that it’s largely been domestic consumer growth fueling the country. But that is... an irrelevant measure? China’s economy may have gotten more focused on its own consumers for a while, but it didn’t like stop being the world’s factory to open up some web startups and KFCs. How many more days of basically zero containers of parts cause shutdowns of production lines in Detroit? How many of your prescription meds are either wholly made in China or are finished here but with precursors largely sourced from China?
It's hard to gauge the impact when we expected everyone to be out of work anyway. Now that we're past that timeframe, it'll be easier to gauge the long-term impact, especially on foreign companies.
I also never said that the impact of the pandemic to manufacturing is irrelevant, only that 1.) provided that factories are starting up again, which many of them are (and we know this, because we can track how much they're emitting) and 2.) the fact that the pandemic hit over the Chinese New year, will mitigate some of the actual impact of the pandemic to the global economy.
Again, all of this assumes that the infection rate in China will continue to slow and that the recent spate of cases outside of China don't escalate to the point where other countries have to implement city-wide quarantines.
Monetary authorities on both sides of the Pacific are doing their damnedest to make sure that doesn't happen though, lowering rates and printing money, so we are probably safe for a while.
Watch out if the US has to go to ZIRP (0% interest) or the day we get enough inflation that the Fed has to shift tack and start talking about tightening...
I think there's a typo there, and it should have read "the FED has to shift the definition of inflation once again"
And once contained there will be pent up demand, that will if anything, improve global finances.
There are countries that simply aren't reporting infections, such as North Korea, which will be persistent jump-off points for new outbreaks on an ongoing basis.
The flu mutates yearly, I'm not aware of this new virus having that ability.
In your scenario over time everyone will have encountered the virus and either are now immune or they die. At that point the spread will slow.
It's not like this hasn't happened before: H1N1, Ebola, Zika. They all died down eventually.
Not sure what coronavirus will do, but clearly diseases like H1N1 can recur.
What is somewhat more scary is that particularly lethal diseases often get less aggressive over time because the less aggressive variants transmit better and offer protection against the more aggressive variants. But since coronavirus can spread before symptoms appear, it's not clear that the same feedback loop will occur.
The market will just get used to it. Right now the fear of the unknown is stopping commerce. All the movers and shakers are elderly people with pre-existing conditions, its accurate for them to be scared.
The rest of humanity will be okay. In the meantime the market will have to deal with the fear from the elder class. The septuagenarians running for head of state and influential organizations.
Apparently the virus damages testes (and kidneys), male fertility is affected.
I can't find the source I've read yesterday, but it was a medical report on a site named something like medvix.
edit : found the site : https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.02.12.20022418v...
That almost sounds delusional to me, but hey, as long as central banks can pump money into the markets, anything goes.
This is like a gift from the Heavens to the Trump Administration. They tried everything they could to bring China to its knees, and failed, one after another.
And then, boom, a new mysterious novel little virus suddenly appears from out of nowhere.
And instead of feeling sympathy for the deaths and suffering of innocent people in China, the Trump Administration immediately pounced on the situation for maximum effect. Suspicious..
The coronavirus will definitely hurt China, but I don't see how it will help the U.S. in trade policy. If anything, it'll just delay any real trade agreement the U.S. and China could make as China devotes it's political attention to the virus.