TruNews discusses the coronavirus pandemic

I highly recommend this discussion of the issues around the coronavirus pandemic

Flu Frenzy: Panic Buying Empties Asian Store Shelves

From yesterday. Go to the last segment

How the coronavirus is affecting the global supply chain

The Coronavirus Is A 
Nightmare For The 
Global Economy

Global consumers reel from 

China’s coronavirus 

containment as stop-work 

orders disrupt supplies of 

iPhones, Hyundai cars and 

toilet paper

• South Korean carmakers are the first of China’s global customers to feel the impact of the Chinese government’s efforts to contain the spread of the coronavirus
• Three of South Korea’s five carmakers halted their production because they could not get crucial components from their Chinese suppliers, whose factories are sitting idle amid the outbreak in China

SCMP,
8 March, 2020

A message went up in the WeChat discussion group shared by residents of The Belcher’s apartment complex in Hong Kong’s Pok Fu Lam district on Wednesday morning. “Toilet paper rolls are running out!” said the post.
As word spread among the estimated 7,000 residents living in The Belcher’s six tower blocks, households rushed into nearby supermarkets to replenish their
stockpiles. By the day’s end, every grocer, pharmacist and supermarket in the
neighbourhood had run out of toilet paper, sanitary towels and alcohol wipes,
adding to the tally of essential goods and staples that are already in short supply as Hongkongers hunker down for their second month of a global viral outbreak.
“Factories on the mainland are shutting for extended periods, so there can be no telling how long the current supply can last,” said Harrison Lee, a local accountant whose entire office is under orders to work from home amid the coronavirus outbreak. “We depend on the mainland for almost everything we eat, or use everyday, so we have to be extra vigilant about signs of disruption.”
Factories in mainland China had been the largest supplier of goods to Hong Kong since 1982, providing 46 per cent of the city’s 2018 imports. The panic hoarding of toilet paper in a Hong Kong neighbourhood offers a glimpse of how China’s manufacturing prowess – the country is dubbed the “world’s factory” for
everything from clothing to cars to smartphones and toys – is being emaciated, as the government ordered assembly workers to stay home to contain a coronavirus outbreak. The disease, which can be traced to the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan, has afflicted 31,453 people around the world at last count, killing 638, most of them in mainland China.

A shopper stocks up on sanitary products at the Taste supermarket in Wan Chai, amid the coronavirus outbreak on 5 February 2020. Photo: Nora Tam

To contain the transmission of the disease, the Chinese government has extended the nationwide public holiday for the Year of the Rat in the lunar calendar, and ordered companies and factories across 17 cities and provinces to stop operating until February 9, forcing an estimated 50 million people to stay home. As a result, factories are sitting idle, and the effects are beginning to show up in far-flung corners of the global supply chain, from Apple’s iPhones to Hyundai Motor’s cars, fuelling Hong Kong’s panic over toilet paper.

“The greater the disruption in China, the more likely it is to spread overseas,” Capital

Economics’ chief emerging markets economist Neil Shearing said in a Reuters interview.

“Given that China is now at the heart of many global supply chains, this will have knock-on effects around the world.”

Infographics: 2019 coronavirus surpasses 2003 Sars outbreak in afflictions

This isn’t China’s first brush with an epidermic. Seventeen years ago in 2003, southern

China’s Guangdong province was the source of the global outbreak of the severe acute respiratory syndrome, or Sars, which sickened 8,098 people in 17 countries, killing 774 patients.

This year’s outbreak, which like the 2003 disease is linked to a coronavirus, has surpassed

Sars in affliction. The difference though, is China’s role in global manufacturing and the economy’s heft in world trade.

To read article GO HERE

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-02-07/apple-extends-store-closures-in-china-over-coronavirus?srnd=premium-europe

There is a very good discussion of the issues here

Flu Frenzy: Panic Buying 
Empties Asian Store Shelves

China Bloodbath on the stock market

China Bloodbath: Stocks 
Crash; Oil, Iron Limit Down 
Despite Emergency PBOC 
Intervention, Rate Cuts

Zero Hedge,

2 February, 2020

As previewed on Friday  and again earlier today when we noted the latest trades in China's A50 futures...

... China's reopening from the long Lunar New Year holiday was set to be ugly, and sure enough with Chinese stocks resuming trade at 9am on Monday, a wave of selling was unleashed culminating in nothing short of a bloodbath with the Shanghai Composite crashing 9% at the open, down by the most since the bursting of China's 2015 stock bubble, and wiping out 12 months worth of gains in a corona moment.

Not even the hilarious beat in China's Manufacturing PMI (this time from Caixin), which somehow surpased expectations of a 51.0 print by the smallest amount possible at 51.1 (down from 51.5) despite a major portion of China's population under quarantine and the economy hitting a brick wall, had any impact on stocks.

What is odd is that this is happening even as China earlier in the day barred short selling, which only means the central bank made a huge oversight and should have also banned all selling altogether.

As stocks collapse the flight to safety is predictably on with 10Y Chinese bond tumbling in yield to 3%, matching the lowest yield since late 2016...

... while spiking in price.

The selloff wasn't limited just to stocks, however, with China’s benchmark iron ore contract falling by its daily limit of 8%, with copper, crude and palm oil also plunging by the maximum allowed. This is bad news for anyone still holding on to dreams of a Chinese economic renaissance, as the following correlation between China's macro surprise index and copper demonstrates.

China's bloodbath is taking place even as the PBOC scrambled earlier in the day to inject a gross 1.2 trillion in liquidity which however as we explained, was woefully inadequate because when netting off the 1 trillion in short-term reverse repo funds scheduled to mature on Monday, the liquidity injection amounted to a far more modest 150BN yuan, or just over $27BN.

The lack of any notable impact from China's reverse repo injection probably explains why shortly after the catastrophic open, the PBOC also cut rates on both its 7 day and 14 day-reverse repo from 2.5% to 2.4%, and from 2.65% to 2.55% respectively.

Then, as a result of the unexpected additional easing, the Yuan promptly slumped back under 7.00, potentially risking the framework of the US-China trade deal, and the reversal in the US Treasury's designation of China as a currency manipulator.

Then again, in retrospect it's probably not accurate to say China's emergency intervention and rate cut has had no positive impact on stocks: after all US futures have surged since the open and are up 0.7%, or 21 points, to 3,245 from Friday's 3,223 close.

As a reminder, 3,250 is the critical gamma "flip" level which has to be sustained at all costs...

... or else any additional selling will only beget even more selling, which is certainly on the mind of whoever is buying US futs even as China is crashing.

Global debt tops $188,000,000,000,000

Global Debt Tops 

$188,000,000,000,000 – 

Officially The Biggest Debt 

Bubble The World Has Ever 

Seen

Authored by Michael Snyder via TheMostImportantNews.com,

The world is now 188 trillion dollars in debt, and that number continues to grow rapidly each year.

Zero Hedge,

8 November, 2019

It is a form of enslavement that is deeply insidious, because most of those living on the planet do not even understand how the system works, and even if they did most of them would have absolutely no hope of ever getting free from it. The borrower is the servant of the lender, and the global financial system is designed to funnel as much wealth to the top 0.1% as possible. Of course throughout human history there has always been slavery, and the primary motivation for having slaves is to extract an economic benefit from those that are enslaved. And even though most of us don’t like to think of ourselves as “slaves” today, the truth is that the global elite are extracting more wealth from all of us than ever before. So much of our labor is going to make them wealthy, and yet most people don’t even realize what is happening.

Let’s start with a very simple example to help illustrate this.

When you go into credit card debt and you only make small payments each month, you can easily end up paying back more than double the amount of money that you originally borrowed.

So where does all that money go?

Well, of course it goes to the financial institution that you got your credit card from, and in turn that financial institution is owned by the global elite.

In essence, you willingly became a debt slave when you chose to go into credit card debt, and the hard work that it took to earn enough money to pay back that debt with interest ended up enriching others.

On a much larger scale, the same thing is happening to entire nations.

Today, the United States government is nearly 23 trillion dollars in debt. In essence, we have been collectively enslaved, and we have been obligated to pay back all of that money with interest. Of course at this point it is literally impossible for us to ever pay back all that debt, and every year we add another trillion dollars or so to the balance. The global elite are now extracting more than 500 billion dollars in interest from this debt on an annual basis, and it is expected that number will greatly escalate in the years ahead.

It is not an accident that the Federal Reserve and the federal income tax were both instituted in 1913. The Federal Reserve system was designed to create an endless debt spiral that would get the federal government in as much debt as possible, and since that time the size of our national debt has gotten more than 7000 times larger. And the federal income tax was needed as the mechanism through which our wealth is transferred to the government to service all of this debt.

It is truly a deeply, deeply insidious system, and the American people should refuse to back any politician that does not favor shutting it down, but at this point this isn’t even a major political issue in our nation.

And of course the United States is far from alone. Even though we can’t get the whole world to agree on much of anything, somehow virtually the entire planet has been convinced that debt-based central banking is the way to go.

In fact, at this point 99.9 percent of the population of the world lives in a country that has a central bank.

According to Wikipedia, there are only 9 very small nations that do not have a central bank at this point…

-Andorra

-Isle of Man

-Monaco

-Nauru

-Kiribati

-Tuvalu

-Palau

-Marshall Islands

-Federated States of Micronesia

If you combine the populations of all of those 9 nations together, it comes to much less than 0.1% of the total global population.

Do you think that this is just a coincidence?

The global elite do not want humanity to be free. They want us to be in as much debt as possible so that we can make them richer.

When you realize how badly the game has been rigged, then a lot of things start to make a whole lot more sense.

For example, for those that understand how the system works it is certainly not surprising that the total amount of debt in the world has hit a new all-time record high of 188 trillion dollars…

The global debt load has surged to a new all-time record equivalent to more than double the world’s economic output, IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva warned Thursday.

While private sector borrowing accounts for the vast majority of the total, the rise puts governments and individuals at risk if the economy slows, she said.

“Global debt — both public and private — has reached an all-time high of $188 trillion. This amounts to about 230 percent of world output,” Georgieva said in a speech to open a two-day conference on debt.

That number has risen by 24 trillion dollars since 2016, and it is the biggest debt bubble that the world has ever seen by a very wide margin.

Of course at some point this debt bubble is going to burst in a global disaster of epic proportions, but meanwhile the global elite are going to continue to milk all of us for as long as they possibly can.

Here in the United States, we have been on the greatest debt binge in the history of our nation since the last financial crisis. U.S. government debt has more than doubled, state and local government debt has ballooned to ridiculous proportions in much of the nation, corporate debt has doubled, student loan debt has more than doubled, auto loan debt just keeps hitting new record highs, and U.S. consumers are now 14 trillion dollars in debt.

Our mountain of debt has become so colossal that the only way to keep the game going is to borrow even more money, but by borrowing more money we make our enslavement even worse.

Meanwhile, those that are holding our debt just continue to live the high life as they laugh all the way to the bank