Deadly Viral and Economic Reapers

If the bad case scenarios do accelerate the viral epidemic could be the pin that pricks the greatest bubble in the world, not only in China but the entire world. “The spread of the coronavirus coincides with the downturn in the global credit cycle, with potentially catastrophic results. At the time of writing, analysts are still trying to get to grips with the virus’s economic impact and they commonly express the hope that after a month or two everything will return to normal. This seems too optimistic,” writes Gold Money.

Entire economies are stalling in distant parts of the world because of what’s going on in China. Morgan Stanley Asia chairman Stephen Roach said, “With the world economy operating dangerously close to stall speed, the confluence of ever-present shocks and a sharply diminished trade cushion raises serious questions about financial markets’ increasingly optimistic view of global economic prospects.”

Charles Hugh Smith writes, “The shock wave unleashed in China on January 23 is about to hit the U.S. economy and shatter everything that is fragile and fantasy, starting with the U.S. stock market. The shock wave is still reverberating through the vulnerable Chinese economy, toppling all that is fragile: auto sales, sales of empty flats in Ghost Cities, shadow banking loans that cannot be paid, workers’ wages that won’t be paid, businesses that won’t re-open, supply chains dependent on marginal enterprises and most saliently, the faith of the people in their hubris-soaked, self-serving leadership.”

“The fantasy in the U.S. is that the shock wave doesn’t exist. Since the shock wave has been hurtling with undimmed force toward the shores of all-mighty American complacency beneath the Pacific, unseen, America’s laughable fantasy has spread through the thundering stampede triggered by the fools in the Federal Reserve in early October,” continues Smith. This might all tern on a dime at any moment as the news terns from bad to worse.

We were already in deep trouble before the coronavirus hit (see far below), and now the walls are threatening to crumble all around us. The suspension of business operations in China due to the coronavirus outbreak was supposed to continue until Sunday, but it remains uncertain when normal operations will actually resume. If the halt is protracted, it could deal a major blow to the global economy. It seems like this is already happening.

In a warm up exercise for the next (this coronavirus) pandemic world health and governmental experts, in October of 2019, said that “the world will not be able to survive the financial meltdown as a result of the epidemic. The world will have to move to a centralized currency system to help stave off collapse. US says the world has to move to a “war footing” and the major transnational corporations are calling for an emergency Marshall Plan that will give them huge tax breaks.”

Chris Martenson is “claiming that humanity is now facing its greatest threat.” He is an important source of daily information about the combined medical and business implications. The worst news for the world is that China’s economy appears to have ground to a halt. That conclusion was cemented after looking at some other real-time charts which suggest that there is a very high probability that China’s GDP in Q1 will not only flatline, but crater deep in the red for one simple reason: there is little economic activity taking place. James Howard Kunstler talks about the income streams across many industries that are breaking hard, “The workings of this hyper-complex financial system depend utterly on the velocity of these revenue streams. They can’t just… stop!”

China faces an inescapably fatal dilemma: to save its economy from collapse, China’s leadership must end the quarantines soon and declare China “safe for travel and open for business” to the rest of the world. But since 5+ million people left Wuhan to go home for New Years, dispersing throughout China, the virus has likely spread to small cities, towns and remote villages with few if any coronavirus test kits and few medical facilities to administer the tests multiple times to confirm the diagnosis.

How well you think the world, and people in it will do if every city gets shut down like Chinese cities already are? For more than a week, the rare resident of Shanghai who dared venture outside has encountered something unfamiliar: a surreal peace and quiet. The deadly coronavirus epidemic has brought much of China to a standstill, but perhaps nowhere has the change been more stark than in the country’s biggest and most vibrant city.

Gone are the traffic jams, crowded sidewalks and businessmen hurrying to work, replaced by eerily empty roads, shuttered bars and businesses, and only the occasional pedestrians — always behind a protective mask. Shanghai is the most populous of China’s many mega-cities, but its usual gathering points look like they were hit with a neutron bomb. The towering corporate skyscrapers are largely empty.

How much GDP will this city put out? How many will die in their apartments from Also we read, “Tankers, Tankers. Everywhere!” – Virus Causes Historic’ Traffic Jam’ Across Asian Supply Lines.

The coronavirus might turn out to be a plague of biblical proportions, at least that is the way the hype is going. If so, the economic damage will be immense. Just for starters more than 300 of the Global Top 500 companies have a presence in Wuhan, including Microsoft and Siemens. Wuhan has 10 car factories, including those Honda, Renault, PSA and General Motors. The car industry represents around 20 percent of the city’s economy and employs 200,000 people directly and more than a million indirectly.

Brace For Chaos

Zero Hedge published, “Brace for chaos: in a few weeks, the next person to sneeze may be arrested, quietly pulled aside by the authorities, and tested for coronavirus. People in the US experiencing flu-like symptoms will be screened for the latest coronavirus that originated from China, officials with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention announced during a briefing on Friday, adding that it will roll out 5 labs, in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Seattle, to screen patients through the ominously sounding “national flu surveillance program”; if that wasn’t bad enough, they also said the program is likely to expand as more confirmed cases are expected in the coming days and weeks.”

It appears that the U.S. military is taking this coronavirus outbreak extremely seriously. An executive order has been issued which has initiated the implementation of “the Department of Defense Global Campaign plan for Pandemic Influenza and Infectious Diseases 3551-13”.

We don’t know all of the details of the plan, but we do know that it instructs U.S. military officials “to prepare for widespread outbreaks”. Many in the mainstream media continue to try to convince us that this virus is not much more dangerous than the common flu, but if that is true then why is our military taking such a dramatic step?

Conditions Before The Coronavirus

In his essay, ‘Estimating the shape of the coming crisis’ Alasdair Macleod writes, “From the foregoing it should be clear that not only is there a financial and systemic crisis in the wings, but it cannot be resolved by central banks using the tools available to them. We can easily deduce that there will be the usual end of credit cycle systemic and financial problems, likely to involve the rescue of one or more major banks. Furthermore, the monetary debasement by central banks will be significantly greater than that following the Lehman crisis, not only because the scale of the banking problem is likely to involve far larger numbers, but because of the impossible position the US government finds itself in with respect to its own finances.”

Doug Casey said, “I predict the Greater Depression will be … well … greater. This is going to be one for the record books. Much different, much longer lasting, and much worse than the unpleasantness of 1929-1946. A financial crisis far greater than any America has seen could soon strike. For some it could completely wipe out their savings…” For others it can even be worse with massive starvation a likely part of worst case scenarios because food production is going down and prices of foods are spiraling up and up.

“The reckoning is coming, and everyone who counted on “eternal growth of borrowing” to stave off the reckoning is in for a big surprise: revenues will plummet, incomes will plummet, lending will plummet, college enrollments will plummet, and tax receipts will plummet. Defaults will skyrocket, triggering a collapse in debt markets, housing markets and stock markets, all of which are totally dependent on the delusion that we can deal with soaring costs by borrowing more, forever and ever. The smartest most experienced rats flee the ship at the first sign that “this sucker is going down.” The complacent rats who believe that extending the line of “permanent growth” will track reality will lose the opportunity to exit before the panic, and they will pay the price for their delusional complacency,” writes Charles Hugh Smith.

“It’s no longer just me using terms like “Armageddon, crisis, devastating, chaos, Great Depression;” it’s leaders of the world’s most august and conservative central banks,” says David Haggith who concludes, “So, we’ve landed where I’ve said we would land, and we now get to watch how the failed plans of our central banksters play out. Will it be catastrophically like an animal falling off a cliff or slowly, like an animal sinking into the La Brea Tar Pits? I don’t know the answer to that because we’ve come into that place we’ve never been before. “Catastrophic” and “Amarageddon” are the words bankers and analysts are using for it, but whether that comes about by sudden heart attack or slow strangulation, who can know? That it is coming about or is in severe risk of coming about, those in high banking places seem to agree — those, at least, who are now free to speak. The ones actually in charge dare not say so.”

“One would have to place their trust in unicorns, sasquatch, leprechauns, and the tooth fairy to believe the current economic construct is sustainable. You also need to be woefully ignorant of history. In fact, there has never been a nation that engaged in massive debt monetization and did not eventually face hyperinflation, depression, and mass chaos. There is simply no such thing as magic, and you can’t build an economy on the foundation of debt, asset bubbles, and unlimited fiat money printing,” writes Michael Pento.

In another essay Smith writes, “This sucker is going down, and sooner than we think. The Fed can create trillions out of thin air and give it to banks, financiers and corporations, but they can’t force them to actually invest in the nation’s real economy or even buy the assets the Fed so desperately wants them to buy, i.e. stocks. The banks and financiers have used the Fed’s trillions to enrich themselves for eleven years, and nothing will stop their legalized looting except a collapse of the entire machine. The great karmic irony is they’ve rigged and gamed the system so rapaciously, absolutely confident there’s no end to the loose money, that they’ve overlooked the increasing fragility of the entire system they’ve ruthlessly exploited. Once the contagion starts spreading, loose money won’t put the fires out. The idols and false gods (The Fed et al.) will fail most spectacularly, and the karmic fury will not abate until the every last skim and every last con has been consumed.”

Conclusion

“The United States, like the other parts of the world that have been ravaged by rampant economic inequality and corporate despotism, is headed for a social breakdown. This gets more apparent every time wealth disparity is shown to be at a decades-high level, every time the military budget is expanded by billions of dollars to fight endless wars, every time the country’s militarized police shoot an innocent person. Ten or twenty years from now, our society’s current form will have taken on an extreme version of itself: no real freedoms, basically no semblance of democracy, and conditions for the majority of people that are either in or approaching squalor,” writes Rainer Shea.

Chris Martenson writes, “The tides are turning. The social mood darkens. The Fourth Turning is upon us. Despite all the attempts to force happiness on society based on record stocks and bonds prices, fewer and fewer folks are feeling the joy. “More of the same” is no longer compelling. Instead, people are increasingly hungry for new ideas and new paths that offer compelling solutions. Don’t look to the government to help. It’s proving it’s dominated by mainstream politicians who aren’t aware of exactly what’s at stake or how to go about addressing it. Don’t look to the private sector, either. Corporations are mostly locked in a battle for a pie of profits that has stopped growing. So, it’s up to us. You and me. We’ve got to figure out what new models will yield a sustainable, prosperous and happy future.”

What’s Happening