5 Million Potential Carriers Have Left Wuhan As Coronavirus Appears To Mutate Into “More Transmissable” Form
Over the weekend, there were numerous media reports published in hopes of easing fears that the coronavirus spread was uncontained, and informing the general public just how seriously China takes its quarantine of no less than 17 cities and roughly 60 million people. Take this report from AFP, according to which Police at a roadblock on the outskirts of Wuhan turned away cars trying to leave the virus-stricken epicenter on Saturday, as other anxious residents trapped inside spent the Lunar New Year stocking up on masks and medical supplies.
“Authorities have prevented anyone from leaving Wuhan, the city of 11 million people at the heart of the viral outbreak which has so far infected nearly 1,300 people and killed 41 others” AFP writes adding that its reporters saw “a steady trickle of cars approaching the roadblocks around 20 kilometres (12 miles) east of the city centre on Saturday morning, only for police in fluorescent jackets wearing masks to tell them to turn around.”
The barricade, at one of the tolls for highways exiting the city, was blocked with red and yellow plastic barriers and cones.
“Nobody can leave,” a policeman told AFP.
Yet, but… there is just one problem: the much needed quarantine and lockdown were far too late, because as Wuhan’s mayor Zhou Xianwang revealed on Sunday during a press conference, about 5 million residents had already left Wuhan before the lockdown because of the deadly coronavirus epidemic and the Spring Festival holiday. As the SCMP reports, many of Wuhan’s residents had already left the city for the holiday, while others rushed out after the lockdown was announced on Wednesday night.
As a result, only 9 million people were remaining in the city after the lockdown, with roughly a third of it, including countless cases of coronavirus, having already spread across China.
Due to the Chinese Lunar New Year and the #WuhanCoronavirus, more than 5 million people left Wuhan and 9 million people remain in the city which is under lockdown: Wuhan mayor pic.twitter.com/hi2NwsHmou
Meanwhile, in Chinese health officials warned the virus’ ability to spread was getting stronger, and in the worst possible news for China, Ma Xiaowei, the minister in charge of China’s National Health Commission (NHC), told a press conference that battling the outbreak had become especially complicated, after it was discovered that the new virus could be transmitted even during incubation period, which did not happen with Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome).
In other words, as many as tens if not hundreds of thousands of Coronavirus carriers quietly fled, and may have infected as many as 3-4 other people each, depending on the R0 of the virus.
“From observations, the virus is capable of transmission even during incubation period,” Ma said, adding that the incubation period lasted from one to 14 days. “Some patients have normal temperatures and there are many milder cases. There are hidden carriers,” he said.
As for the piece de resistance, Ma said also that the virus had adapted to humans and appeared to have become more transmissible: “There are signs showing the virus is becoming more transmissible. These walking ‘contagious agents’ [hidden carriers] make controlling the outbreak a lot more difficult.”
Even China’s authorities sounds like they are giving up: Li Bin, deputy minister of the NHC said the authorities that the severe measures they had taken to control the spread of the virus – such as issuing travel bans and locking down cities – would at least delay the peak and “buy time to combat the next stage of the outbreak”, according to SCMP.
Yes, China is already bracing for “the next stage of the outbreak.”
To help tackle the epidemic, which has closed off 17 cities, Ma said that 2,360 military and civilian doctors and nurses had been sent to Wuhan, the city in which the outbreak was first detected at the end of last month. As the pressure has mounted on the city’s hospitals, the medical system has moved ever closer to collapse.
Many people who developed feverish symptoms were turned away by hospitals earlier in the week because there were not enough beds, local residents said earlier. Medical practitioners are also running seriously short of protective kits and are being forced to recycle goggles and masks. Ma said 2,400 hospital beds had been added in Wuhan, and the government was planning to add 5,000 more over the next three days.
Wang Jiangping, China’s vice-minister of industry and information technology, said China had the capacity to produce a maximum of 30,000 protective outfits per day, but that was less than a third of what was needed in Hubei.
Meanwhile, the hunt for the real source of the pandemic continues. China imposed a nationwide ban on wildlife trade on Sunday, as the outbreak was originally suspecteded to have originated at a seafood market in Wuhan, which also sold wild animals. However, a research paper published by medical journal The Lancet on Saturday said the first confirmed case of the viral infection was a person who had not been to that market.
Italians Head To Polls In Regional Vote That Could Topple The Government
Italians in Emiglia Romagna and Calabria are heading to the polls on Sunday to vote in critical local elections that could dramatically shift the balance of power in the Italian government, and possibly trigger the collapse of a fragile ruling coalition already showing signs of strain.
The candidate of the League-led center-right coalition is expected to win handily in Calabria, a stronghold in the conservative south, but if the League candidate manages to win the governorship in Emilia-Romagna, it would be a huge step for League leader Matteo Salvini as he plots his political comeback and seeks his revenge on his former partners, the Five Star Movement. For months, opinion polls have consistently shown that the far-right, anti-migrant League is the most popular political party in the country.
Readers outside Italy may or may not remember the circumstances surrounding the collapse of the last Italian government over the summer, but in any case, here’s a quick refresher. After weeks of intrigue, then-Five Star leader Luigi Di Maio outflanked League leader Matteo Salvini, his fellow co-deputy PM, and managed to form a new ruling coalition led by Five Star and the center-left Democratic Party, while banishing Salvini – whose decision to dissolve the government to try and rid himself of his Five-Star partners backfired in a big way – to the opposition.
Unfortunately for Di Maio, since Five Star Movement’s entire raison d’etre is based in the populist backlash to the technocratic political hacks who have been blamed for running Italy’s economy into the ground, the deal with the PD was a political liability from the very start, and has proved unpopular among supporters of both parties.
But Salvini swore that he would end up back on top. During the ensuing months, Salvini relentlessly campaigning around the country, but especially in Emiglia Romagna, a region that is recognized as the birthplace of Italian socialism, and in contemporary times has been dominated by the center left.
The League triumphed in the region during the EU parliamentary elections in May, becoming the leading party with 34% of the vote to the PD’s 31%, and Salvini led the party to another historic upset in Umbria three months ago.
Lucia Bonaccini, the League candidate for governor of Emilia-Romagna, and Salvini
Sunday’s vote is being held one day after Di Maio resigned on Wednesday to try and stave off a crisis of leadership within the party. But if the PD loses control of Emilia-Romagna, its leadership might conclude that the partnership with Five Star is politically doomed, and that it would be better off abandoning the alliance, which would thrust the Italian government back into chaos.
If the government is dissolved and no new coalition can be formed, Italians will again head to the polls for another national vote.
“If the PD were to lose another regional bastion after Umbria three months ago, it may conclude that it would have more to lose from staying in alliance with the ever-weaker M5S than from risking new elections,” Berenberg Economics said on Friday via Al Jazeera.
Salvini has been non-stop campaigning in the region, posting videos of him eating regional delicacies like Parma ham and Parmesan cheese, prompting some to accuse him of overshadowing the League’s gubernatorial candidate, Lucia Borgonzoni. On Saturday, Salvini pushed the envelope even further by tweeting through the campaign’s ‘blackout’ period.
On Sunday, he tweeted a video of Borgonzoni casting her ballot and urged supporters to get out and vote.
The last opinion polls published before the pre-election media blackout showed Salvini’s anti-immigrant, anti-European League neck-and-neck with the PD.
ANSA reports that as of noon in Italy (6 am in New York), turnout in both regions was higher than the last round of local votes in November 2014. But polls don’t close in the regional votes until 11 pm in Rome (about 5 pm in New York).
Of course, the vote should have important implications for Italian markets, and the euro. And if the League candidate wins both races, we suspect bondholders won’t be happy.
Since its publication on Thursday, my New York Times Op-Ed has continued to stimulate dialogue and discussion. It was also published in Saturday’s print edition. This post will highlight a few of the responses.
In a Times op-ed this week, the Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law Houston argued that this narrowing of the impeachment power reflects the difficulty of defining when politicized machinations shade into the abuse of power. Allowing that Trump is particularly crude about it, all presidents conflate their own political self-interest with the national interest — and so deciding when a president crosses the line and betrays his office is almost always a task best left up to the voters.
Both the strengths and limits of Blackman’s argument are distilled in one of his historical examples: Lyndon Johnson’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark’s son Ramsey Clark as attorney general, part of a maneuver to induce Clark’s resignation so that Johnson could then appoint the first African-American justice and consolidate African-American support.
This is a useful example because it’s been apparent for a while that Trump doesn’t want to be an American Mussolini so much as he wants to be a less legislatively minded L.B.J. — meaning that his conception of the presidency belongs to the middle of the 20th century, when a casual corruption was more commonplace, and presidents routinely used their powers to spy on political opponents (as L.B.J. did to Barry Goldwater) or undermine them, enable their private appetites (cough, J.F.K.) and cover up their scandals.
But in this late hour, an exception has arrived in the form of Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law Houston professor. Blackman is a conservative legal scholar who has played a notable role in the legal battles surrounding the Affordable Care Act. He does not share Trump’s most extreme legal stances on impeachment. Blackman acknowledges that an impeachable offense “need not be criminal,” and he disagrees with Trumpworld’s constant assertion that impeachment amounts to the overturning of an election. While senators may have no choice but to listen to Trump’s lawyers, engaging with the strongest alternatives available is more productive for everyone else.
Matt raises a number of important points that I hope to respond to in due course.
What of the case made by law professor Josh Blackman in the New York Times on Thursday: that presidents often pursue policies in hopes of improving their political prospects? It is true, of course, that presidents consider domestic politics, including electoral politics, in everything they do. There’s nothing wrong with that. Presidents should act to increase their influence, and that includes taking actions with their professional reputation and personal popularity in mind. . . .
Blackman’s analysis is also wrong because it matters how a president uses policy for political advantage. Trump is accused of soliciting foreign election interference! Unlike maneuvering to get a Supreme Court justice to resign, or even deploying troops, Trump tried to get a foreign nation to influence an election. That’s not just a likely violation of U.S. law; it’s contrary to his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Fourth, Laura Ingraham talked about my piece on her Fox News show:
Fifth, Ben Shapiro discussed my piece on his podcast. (Many, many law students in particular listen to Shapiro.)
Finally, Fox News analyst Gregg Jarrett flagged my article on Fox News’s website, as well as his own blog.
In an excellent opinion column in The New York Times, Constitutional Law Professor Josh Blackman reiterated the Lincoln example and also cited the actions of President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 when he maneuvered to appoint Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. This advanced civil rights enormously, while also burnishing Johnson’s political standing.
As Blackman explained: “Politicians routinely promote their understanding of the general welfare, while, in the back of their minds, considering how those actions will affect their popularity. There is nothing corrupt about acting based on such competing and overlapping concerns. Yet the impeachment trial threatens to transform this well-understood aspect of politics into an impeachable offense.”
And then President Trump retweeted Jarrett–the closest I’ve gotten (so far at least) to a presidential tweet.
On Friday morning, I noted that I would try to avoid checking my Twitter mentions. So far, so good. I think my new policy will be to post onto Twitter, but not check how people react. If there is something important you want to tell me, email me, don’t @ me. And if there is some breaking news that you think I should be aware of, please email me as well.
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Owning gold is a way to get out of this “debt trap”, but governments don’t want you to own gold, especially in Germany
Germans, like Indians and Chinese, love their gold – although their reasons for buying and keeping bullion are somewhat different.
In China and India, gold jewelry is a status symbol – a sign of wealth and success. In Germany, owning gold bars and coins, maybe a 24-karat necklace or two, is a means of preserving wealth, especially in times of war or economic crisis, something never far from Germans’ minds, considering their history.
Indeed the “war guilt” Germans experience over the atrocities of Nazi Germany is accompanied by fears that their government could again lose control of fiat money, as the Weimar Republic did in the 1920s, leading to devastating hyper-inflation.
In India “a marriage is not a marriage without gold.” Indians find it auspicious to be-gift gold jewelry during the Diwali festival, which begins in October, and wedding season. Gold-shopping for the bride is thought to bring good fortune and invoke the blessings of a Hindu goddess. At nearly 20 million weddings a year, Indians’ annual demand for the precious metal exceeds 514 tonnes. Easy to see why the country’s private gold holdings are the largest in the world, a mind-boggling 24,000 tonnes. (almost as much as the world’s top 10 central bank holdings combined)
However in 2016 China overtook India as the world’s top buyer of gold jewelry. The country’s growing throng of affluent consumers is driving demand for gold rings, bracelets and necklaces, especially in January and February when many Chinese purchase gold jewelry as gifts for Chinese New Year. According to McKinsey & Company, by 2025 China will represent up to 44% of the global luxury jewelry market.
While the populations of China and India are known for liking physical gold, Germany flies under the radar. An astounding +26 million Germans have investments in gold bars and coins. In fact far more Germans have savings in physical gold than in the stock market – a statistic hard to imagine in the United States or Canada.
According to a recent survey by the Research Center for Financial Services on behalf of Reisebank, Germans currently own 8,918 tonnes of gold worth 330 billion euros (USD$367.5 billion), just over half (55% or 4,925 tonnes) in bars and coins.
Gold fans may also be surprised to know that Germany’s central bank is loaded up with more bullion than any other’s, except for the United States, 3,366.8 tonnes versus 8,133.5t held by the US Treasury, most of which is in Fort Knox, Kentucky.
A four-year plan to repatriate 674 tonnes of German gold held at the Banque de France and the Federal Reserve of New York was completed in 2017.
Yet these facts and figures indicating strong gold buy-in are incongruous with a new German law that severely limits the anonymity of citizens’ gold purchases. In this article we are asking, “Why are Germans lining up for gold?”
“Tafelgeschäfte”
Until January 1, 2020, the maximum amount of gold an individual could purchase in Germany, without disclosing personal information, was €10,000. However in response to a European Union directive targeted at money laundering and terrorist financing, the German government set a new, far lower limit of €2,000.
The wholly predictable result? Panic gold buying, with long lines of customers queuing up outside the country’s precious metals shops and gold dealer showrooms, during the last days of December.
“We are currently being overrun,” Börse Online, Germany’s leading investor magazine, quoted the managing director at Degussa Edelmetalle, one of Germany’s biggest gold dealers, regarding the situation. “The queues go up into the street.” The other large trader, Pro Aurum, reported a tripling of normal order volumes.
The legion of gold buyers, of course, were there to purchase under €10,000 worth of gold, in anonymous transactions that don’t require identity checks, before the new rule kicked in on Jan. 1, 2020. Their rightly justified fear was that passing on one’s information to the seller, then on to the government, would allow the government to, if it wished, confiscate their gold, as has been done several times historically, detailed further down in the article.
There are a few interesting points to make about this legislation.
The first is, why did they even bother to include precious metals? The fifth EU Money Laundering Directive, introduced by the EU in 2018, set out new requirements to prevent money from being laundered and used to finance terrorist groups. A laudable goal, it was directed at over-the-counter transactions known in German as “Tafelgeschäfte”, where the customer purchases an investment or security in physical form, such as bearer bonds, an equity security with attached dividend coupons, or precious metals bars and coins.
EU member states are given flexibility in how they implement EU directives. Yet despite the directive not saying anything about precious metals, in November 2019 the German parliament, the Bundestag, passed a law that lowered the threshold where precious metals can be bought without identify checks (aka anonymous transactions) from €10,000 to €2,000. This now includes purchases of the popular 1-oz gold coin.
A second point concerns the timing of the legislation. Just three years ago, in 2017, the Bundestag changed the threshold from €15,000 to €10,000 – suggesting the German government is moving very rapidly to increase the transparency of gold transactions.
The last point is the most interesting: Why? According to the 2019 bill,
“The findings of the national risk analysis have shown that, especially in the area of gold trading, heavy cash transactions are taking place just below the current threshold for identification obligations of 10,000 euros… The threshold of EUR 2,000 envisaged in the draft law aims to prevent or significantly limit this bypass trade.”
The problem here is that, when questioned by German parliamentary deputies about the law and asked to provide evidence for it, the government either claimed to have no knowledge, or deferred responsibility to the Länder (provinces).
For example, it could not say what is the annual volume of precious metals trading in Germany, how many people living in Germany bought precious metals using anonymous cash transactions, or what was the annual volume of cash transactions for precious metals.
The question that really exposed the government’s lie – that it is targeting precious metals for money laundering – was “In how many reporting or criminal cases was there a reference to precious metals?
Data recorded by the Central Office for Financial Transaction Investigations (FIU) found that of 137,097 suspicious transactions reported to the FIU, only 239 cases related to precious metals – ie. 0.17%! And of these 239 cases, only four involved amounts below the €10,000 threshold.
The upshot? There is no evidence that over-the-counter cash purchases of precious metals have anything to do with money laundering in Germany.
So why would the government lie? There must be some other reason to target small gold purchases – ridiculously, even buying a 1-oz gold coin in Germany will now trigger an identity check. Bullion dealers are required to keep a record of all transactions over €2,000, for five years, and must by law surrender them if asked to by the authorities.
While we cannot know the answer, we have a few theories:
The government thinks the German economy is in trouble due to excessive savings.
The government is creating an information base for later gold confiscation.
The government doesn’t want its citizens to own gold because their financial/ personal information can’t be easily tracked.
Taking each in turn, we find Germany’s central bank taking extreme measures to kickstart economic growth which slumped to a six-year low in 2019. The anemic 0.6% growth rate was due to a number of factors including a slowdown in its normally booming auto sector. Car production last year fell to its lowest in nearly a quarter century; layoffs have occurred. The country’s economy expanded at the slowest rate since 2013, the height of the eurozone’s debt crisis, dragged down by a manufacturing contraction of 3.6%.
Negative interest rates were introduced to provide an incentive for financial institutions to lend more money, but the tactic hasn’t worked. Economists expect growth this year to barely budge.
“The next decade will be a decade of underperformance, and people may once again start talking about Germany as the sick man of Europe,” the Wall Street Journal quotes Joerg Kraemer, chief economist at Commerzbank in Frankfurt.
One of the biggest problems is consumer spending, or to be more precise, the lack of. In the United States, Canada and other developed nations, close to zero and negative interest rates have fueled consumer and business spending, along with investment in the stock market. Not so in Germany, where citizens have shunned growth-bearing assets like real estate and stocks, preferring to sock their savings away in deposit accounts (and gold).
According to the OECD, Germans save 11% of their disposable income compared with less than 7% in the US. Another article in the Wall Street Journal states:
Last year, German households added €108.7 billion to their bank accounts, more than any time since the euro was introduced, according to Deutsche Bank research. Cash and bank deposits, at €2.5 trillion, make up 40% of Germans’ financial assets, according to Bundesbank data.
And while saving for a rainy day sounds prudent, it’s not making Germans any richer. With a median household income of €61,000 (USD$67,000), Germans are the least likely of all European to own their own homes.
In November consumer sentiment in Europe’s largest economy fell to the lowest level since November 2016, as Chancellor Chancellor Angela Merkel’s coalition of conservatives and Social Democrats (SPD) resists calls for a stimulus package to kickstart the largest economy in Europe.
Could this ingrained mindset of low spending and high savings among Germans be influencing the government’s latest foray into regulating precious metals trading? It certainly appears likely. If gold and silver buyers are made to offer up their personal information when making a bullion/ jewelry purchase, they might, instead of saving euros, consider spending that disposable income, which would help the ailing economy.
The second rationale for the rule change might be that the German government wants to make it easier to track people’s gold purchases in case they need/ want it. There are several historical instances of this happening, including in Germany. In 1939, $97 million worth of gold belonging to Czechoslovakia was stolen by Nazi Germany when its army invaded Prague.
On April 5, 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order criminalizing the possession of gold. Americans were required to deliver their gold bars, coins and certificates to the Federal Reserve in exchange for $20 per ounce. The limitation on gold ownership wasn’t repealed until 1974 by President Gerald Ford.
Other countries have appealed to their populace in times of crisis, to give their gold to the government. In 1935, when Italy was mired in recession, Benito Mussolini passed the “Gold for the Fatherland” initiative. Some 35 tonnes of jewelry and coins was collected then melted down, turned into gold bars, then distributed to national banks. Those who donated were given a steel wristband that read “Gold for the Fatherland”.
In 1997 during the Asian financial crisis, South Korea asked citizens to donate gold to help pay back a $58 million bailout package from the IMF. Appealing to South Koreans’ national pride and sense of shame for accepting a foreign bailout, nearly 3.5 million people, almost a quarter of the population, donated 226 tonnes valued at $2.2 billion. People’s gold necklaces, coins, bars, trinkets, statuettes, medals, pendants and military insignias were promptly melted into gold bars that helped pay off the IMF loan in 2001, three years ahead of schedule.
Our third theory on why Germany wants to limit gold ownership through lowering the anonymous transaction threshold is a little conspiratorial, but nothing we’re about to share is untrue. It can all be fact-checked, and we invite you to do so.
Since the 1970s and ‘80s, the banking system has become reliant on debit and credit cards. Many years ago I wrote an article titled ‘Ignorance is a Temporary Condition’ that explained how the switch from cash to credit has resulted in over-spending and high levels of consumer indebtedness. While the figures in the article are dated, its salient points still ring true, and bear repeating:
In the early 1970s, a nationwide electronic funds transfer system was envisioned. The system would use individualized electronic identification cards and digitized bank accounts with merchants connected to them by telecommunication links.
But it wasn’t until the 1990s that credit and debit card use really caught fire.
Is going cashless a good thing? Not for most people, we tend to spend more when we buy things with a credit or debit card instead of cash:
“Drazen Prelec and Duncan Simester reported studies on this topic in a 2001 issue of Marketing Letters. In one study, they told that randomly selected participants in the study would be offered the opportunity to purchase tickets to an actual professional basketball game that had just sold out. These tickets were highly desirable. Participants were told either that they would have to pay in cash or that they would have to pay by credit card. They were asked how much they would be willing to pay for these tickets. Those who were told they would have to pay by credit card were willing to pay over twice as much on average as those who were told that they would have to pay by cash.”
Art Markman, Ph.D., Psychologytoday.com
Paying with cash, actually pulling the money from a wallet or purse is a vivid enough action to elicit a negative, and in some consumers a mildly painful, psychological reaction that’s absent when either a credit or debit card transaction takes place.
Along with incentivizing card holders to spend freely, inconsequentially, the inception of debit cards provided banks, businesses and government agencies with an endless trail of data from which to track card holders’ spending habits. It was the beginning of the surveillance state around which George Orwell constructed his book ‘1984’.
Indeed, governments are constantly implementing new ways of restricting the use of cash and invading citizens’ privacy.
A 2019 article in creditcards.com describes how owning a credit card is like having “an electronic bug in your wallet.” That’s because each time a purchase is made on debit or credit, a record of that transaction is logged into a database collected by the credit card issuer.
Banks use this data to determine a card-holders credit-worthiness, giving them information on raising credit card interest rates or reducing credit limits.
Mining card issuers’ data also gives banks a means of fraud detection, turning over information to law enforcement, and the most insidious – marketing. According to the article this is done by tracking the “merchant marketing code” (MCC), a four-digit number that denotes the type of business. MCCs can be used for example to restrict health-care spending on health care-related credit cards, or to prevent employees from abusing company credit cards.
The purchasing information is used to build a spending profile of the cardholder which is either used by the card issuer, say to up-sell the cardholder with additional banking products, or is sold to advertising firms, which bombard the cardholder with digital advertising.
In this day and age of smartphones, banks have also reportedly started tracking customers’ cell phone locations in order to crack down on fraud – ie. if a transaction takes place away from a cardholder’s phone, there is a higher likelihood the purchase is fraudulent. The benefit of reducing fraud and its associated costs to credit card companies must be weighed against the invasion of privacy that occurs knowing that your bank is aware where you are and what you are buying at any given moment.
Gold purchasers go “off the grid” in that they are independent of this type of invasive surveillance. It makes sense then that the German government, likely pressured by the banks, would take steps to restrict gold ownership.
There’s also the idea that banks, and governments, like consumers to be in debt. In the US consumer spending accounts for 70% of the economy, so increasing spending in as many ways as possible clearly benefits the government, both in terms of higher revenue from sales taxes, and stimulating the economy through purchases of more goods and services.
Governments reward mortgage holders by allowing them to deduct mortgage interest on their taxes. Businesses that take out loans to purchase equipment for “capital improvements” can also take a tax deduction from the interest.
Also consider, the Federal Reserve favors inflation to deflation, because higher prices, and spending, mean the economy is growing.
Spending more on credit cards, and mortgages, of course is great for banks and other financial institutions, which collect more in interest and payments.
The 2008-09 financial crisis boiled down to a crisis of mortgage debt, with deregulated banks accepting too many loans from high-risk homeowners who should never have been granted these loans.
In North America particularly we have become a society of spenders and debtors, mentored by the worst role model one can imagine, the US government which currently has a national debt of $23 trillion and counting.
Conclusion
Owning gold is a way to get out of this “debt trap”, but governments don’t want you to own gold. They prefer you to invest in the stock market, in real estate, to make all your purchases on debit or credit because these transactions are trackable. You are trackable. The last thing the government wants is a bunch of gold bugs running around “off-grid” especially during tough economic times, when they could be shopping instead of tying up their money in gold bars and coins.
Perhaps this explains why the Germans have fired the first shot in the coming war on gold.
Since its publication on Thursday, my New York Times Op-Ed has continued to stimulate dialogue and discussion. It was also published in Saturday’s print edition. This post will highlight a few of the responses.
In a Times op-ed this week, the Josh Blackman of the South Texas College of Law Houston argued that this narrowing of the impeachment power reflects the difficulty of defining when politicized machinations shade into the abuse of power. Allowing that Trump is particularly crude about it, all presidents conflate their own political self-interest with the national interest — and so deciding when a president crosses the line and betrays his office is almost always a task best left up to the voters.
Both the strengths and limits of Blackman’s argument are distilled in one of his historical examples: Lyndon Johnson’s appointment of Supreme Court Justice Tom C. Clark’s son Ramsey Clark as attorney general, part of a maneuver to induce Clark’s resignation so that Johnson could then appoint the first African-American justice and consolidate African-American support.
This is a useful example because it’s been apparent for a while that Trump doesn’t want to be an American Mussolini so much as he wants to be a less legislatively minded L.B.J. — meaning that his conception of the presidency belongs to the middle of the 20th century, when a casual corruption was more commonplace, and presidents routinely used their powers to spy on political opponents (as L.B.J. did to Barry Goldwater) or undermine them, enable their private appetites (cough, J.F.K.) and cover up their scandals.
But in this late hour, an exception has arrived in the form of Josh Blackman, a South Texas College of Law Houston professor. Blackman is a conservative legal scholar who has played a notable role in the legal battles surrounding the Affordable Care Act. He does not share Trump’s most extreme legal stances on impeachment. Blackman acknowledges that an impeachable offense “need not be criminal,” and he disagrees with Trumpworld’s constant assertion that impeachment amounts to the overturning of an election. While senators may have no choice but to listen to Trump’s lawyers, engaging with the strongest alternatives available is more productive for everyone else.
Matt raises a number of important points that I hope to respond to in due course.
What of the case made by law professor Josh Blackman in the New York Times on Thursday: that presidents often pursue policies in hopes of improving their political prospects? It is true, of course, that presidents consider domestic politics, including electoral politics, in everything they do. There’s nothing wrong with that. Presidents should act to increase their influence, and that includes taking actions with their professional reputation and personal popularity in mind. . . .
Blackman’s analysis is also wrong because it matters how a president uses policy for political advantage. Trump is accused of soliciting foreign election interference! Unlike maneuvering to get a Supreme Court justice to resign, or even deploying troops, Trump tried to get a foreign nation to influence an election. That’s not just a likely violation of U.S. law; it’s contrary to his oath to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.”
Fourth, Laura Ingraham talked about my piece on her Fox News show:
Fifth, Ben Shapiro discussed my piece on his podcast. (Many, many law students in particular listen to Shapiro.)
Finally, Fox News analyst Gregg Jarrett flagged my article on Fox News’s website, as well as his own blog.
In an excellent opinion column in The New York Times, Constitutional Law Professor Josh Blackman reiterated the Lincoln example and also cited the actions of President Lyndon Johnson in 1967 when he maneuvered to appoint Thurgood Marshall as the first African-American justice to the U.S. Supreme Court. This advanced civil rights enormously, while also burnishing Johnson’s political standing.
As Blackman explained: “Politicians routinely promote their understanding of the general welfare, while, in the back of their minds, considering how those actions will affect their popularity. There is nothing corrupt about acting based on such competing and overlapping concerns. Yet the impeachment trial threatens to transform this well-understood aspect of politics into an impeachable offense.”
And then President Trump retweeted Jarrett–the closest I’ve gotten (so far at least) to a presidential tweet.
On Friday morning, I noted that I would try to avoid checking my Twitter mentions. So far, so good. I think my new policy will be to post onto Twitter, but not check how people react. If there is something important you want to tell me, email me, don’t @ me. And if there is some breaking news that you think I should be aware of, please email me as well.
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“Extraordinary Oddity” – Half Of All Manhattan’s New Luxury Condos Sit Unsold
Nancy Packes Inc., an online real estate data services covering the five boroughs of New York City and all residential transactions, reports that nearly half of all new condo units built after 2015 in Manhattan, or about 3,695 of 7,727 apartments, remain unsold.
Despite trillions of dollars printed by global central banks and hundreds of rate cuts since 2015 – Manhattan condos have been unappealing to the wealthy elite and unaffordable to the typical New Yorker.
Also, a confluence of macroeconomic headwinds, as well as SALT deduction caps and transfer taxes, cooled the market even further.
“The extraordinary oddity of the current cycle is that the real estate market has decoupled from the national economy and local economy, where job growth has been steady, and stock market values have been reaching new highs,” according to the report.
As it turns out, the stock market isn’t the real economy. Developers hooked on low-interest rates overbuilt across the borough with the average sale price more than doubling since 2011.
The report warned about the luxury condo glut with limited buyers willing to purchase homes at prices that have far outpaced wages.
There’s even a shadow inventory that lurks on the sidelines, with any market improvement, developers will dispose units into the market – this could produce overhead resistance for years to come.
“You never had this kind of supply in these price ranges,” Gary Barnett, the president and founder of Extell Development, who builds luxury condos in the city, told The New York Times.
“The $5 million to $10 million market is hammered — there’s way too much of it,” Barnett warned. He said developers are now starting to realize the market is oversaturated with limited buyers at these high prices.
The Atlantic notes that developers bet huge on Russian oligarchs, Chinese moguls, Saudi royalty, and Latin American millionaires to soak up the luxury condo supply.
“But the Chinese economy slowed, while declining oil prices dampened the demand for pieds-à-terre among Russian and Middle Eastern zillionaires,” The Atlantic said.
With immigration trends lower, a stronger dollar, protectionism, and the U.S. Treasury cracking down on international real estate laundering schemes — foreign demand for luxury pads in the city has dried up in the last several years.
So, the question remains — what policies or fundamental shifts in the economy can speed up the purchases of all those unsold Manhattan condos?
It’s only a matter of time before one developer, holding an excessive amount of unsold Manhattan condos , is slapped with a crash crunch that would result in the dumping of units on the market at a steep discount would trigger an avalanche in prices.
The alleged masterful Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, failed his primary mission. Yet he’s still the EU’s negotiator.
Barnier Flashback
Revealing words from Michel Barnier in 2016, quoted in @LePoint. “I would have succeeded in my task if, in the end, the deal is so hard on the British that they’ll prefer staying in the EU.” https://t.co/G7aw0RAAjFpic.twitter.com/XNn22Aeqkc
“I would have succeeded in my task if, in the end, the deal is so hard on the British that they’ll prefer staying in the EU.”
Instead, Boris Johnson was elected in a landslide. Yet, Barnier still has his job. He remains the EU’s top negotiator for working out a comprehensive trade deal with the UK.
Over the last few weeks, Michel Barnier has been issuing a constant stream of demands, edicts and ultimatums over everything that Britain will have to agree to before it will be offered a trade deal with the European Union.
The demands are, by any measure, extraordinary. You or I might think a trade agreement between two geographically close entities, with complete regulatory alignment, was a fairly simply thing to agree. We allow the EU countries to sell pretty much whatever we feel like buying from them, subject to health and safety laws, exempt from any quotas and tariffs. And in exchange they do the same for us. Beyond that, there shouldn’t be a great deal to talk about.
To Barnier, however, it is something very different. The EU trades quite happily with China, or Vietnam, or Chile, regardless of how workers are treated, but it won’t be able to trade with Britain unless it has the right to control working hours, labour laws, tax and industrial policy.
The important point, however, is surely this. The EU seems intent on repeating the mistakes of the first phase of Brexit all over again.
In many ways that is typical of the EU’s failings. Nobody is elected, there is no oversight of the competence of officials, and no way of replacing them if they are not doing a good job. Barnier was appointed to the post of Brexit negotiator by Jean-Claude Juncker, and then kept on by his successor to work on the trade agreement, but there has been no review of how competent he has been, or whether his has successfully protected the EU’s strategic and economic interests.
Enormously Bad Luck
Yes, Barnier failed. But how much of it was extraordinarily bad luck?
Had Theresa May said my deal or no deal, the UK would have been trapped in a moronic (for the UK) customs union.
At any point in time, Jeremy Corbyn may have had enough brains to give May her deal. It was in his best interest to do so.
France finally had enough. Macron got in bed with Johnson. Few called this, but I did.
Johnson negotiated a deal with Ireland. Again few thought this was possible, but I was one of the few.
The critical points are actually one and two.
I called this right from the beginning, but I sure had Theresa May wrong. She clearly did not want to leave. If she had an ounce of brains she could have forced her horrid deal through.
Instead we had a fiasco of extension after extension. May made political mistake after mistake.
20-20 Hindsight
People blame bad luck when their analysis is wrong. They have a tendency to believe they are skilled when they get things right.
This is my opinion in retrospect: OK, I got this right, but perhaps I was lucky and Barnier was unlucky.
It really did take an amazing sequence of events.
But, that is what happens when you gamble.
I called it correct, but maybe I was lucky.
Lessons on Gambling
The EU screwed over Cameron. Had the EU tossed any kind of bone to prime minister Cameron, the referendum would not have passed.
Had Barnier not tried to completely screw the UK, a poor deal for the UK would have been the outcome.
Had May not been incompetent, there would have been a deal.
Barnier had the odds in his favor because he knew Theresa May was in his pocket. But instead of going for a sure thing, he put on the screws.
Important Point
“The important point, however, is surely this. The EU seems intent on repeating the mistakes of the first phase of Brexit all over again.”
Yep.
But I called this one long ago.
The EU Will Cave
Johnson will not give in on a fishing deal because he can’t. He needs that leverage over Scotland.
Similarly, Johnson cannot give in to ceding rights to the European Court of Justice, so he won’t.
The EU can either agree to a deal or not. Germany in particular is sweating blood.
So, I expect a deal or at least an agreement to make a deal. For WTO purposes, an agreement is sufficient. There is no need to work out all the details now.
If not, the EU is more screwed than the UK, my position all along.
Barnier’s Bluff
Barnier was not bluffing before (he just took a calculated gamble that lost), but he is bluffing now.
Will Coronavirus Crater Hopes Of A Global Recovery As World Trade Tumbles?
The global economy is faced with a synchronized slowdown as central bank ammunition to fight the next global recession is limited.
Monetary authorities across the world have slashed interest rates 80 times over the last 12 months and printed upwards of $1 trillion over four months to counter the slowdown.
The only apparent solution central bankers have offered is a liquidity-fueled massive stock market melt-up across the world that rivals the end years of the Dot Com bubble (and the liquidity-fueled meltup around Y2K). These unelected officials have also provided forward guidance on how an epic V-shape recovery in the real economy is imminent.
The only problem today that market watchers like ourselves have noticed – is that traditional monetary policy has had a challenging time stimulating growth in developed and emerging economies.
Data from Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis (CPB) showed Friday that global trade volume continued to contract in November, marking one of the most extended stretches of negative growth since the end of the financial crisis.
According to CPB, world trade slipped 0.60% in November over the prior quarter and was down 1.1% compared to the same month a year ago.
November was the sixth month of straight of declines on a Y/Y basis, the longest stretch since right after the 2008 financial crisis.
World trade has dropped sharply from 3.4% in November 2018.
However, there was some good news; the rate of contraction has slowed from a -2% pace seen in October, which was the quickest rate of decline since a decade ago.
And while hope is high that the so-called ‘trade deal’ will lift all boats, data shows that the global economy has continued slowing into 2020 as the Baltic Exchange’s main sea freight index has crashed 70% in the last four months, the biggest down moves since 2008.
Additionally, earlier this week, the IMF downgraded its forecast for global GDP for 2020 and 2021, its sixth straight reduction, although in a sliver of optimism, global GDP in 2020 is now expected to post a modest rebound from 2.9% to 3.3%, (down from 3.4% in October) and to 3.4% in 2021 (down from 3.6%) as the IMF said, “there are now tentative signs that global growth may be stabilizing, though at subdued levels.”
Before Davos this week, the World Economic Forum (WEF) President Borge Brende warned the world is “faced with a synchronized slowdown in the global economy. And we’re also faced with a situation where the ammunition that we have to fight a potential global recession is more limited.”
Last week, the UN published its annual report that warned the global economy recorded its lowest growth in a decade in 2019, falling to 2.3% as a result of the U.S. and China trade war and sharp pullbacks in investment.
The report warns of slowbalisation will define the global economy in the early 2020s. Growth is expected to pick up slightly across the world from 2.3% last year to 2.5% in 2020, but that depends on the effectiveness of monetary policy and if all trade disputes can be resolved.
And on top of everyone warning about a decelerating global economy in 2020, the market’s most important pillars of support – buybacks – are declining.
If the global economy fails to rebound in a V-shape fashion in early 2020, asset manages and leverage funds, who’ve already priced in a massive recovery by bidding stocks to record highs, could soon see a repricing of growth that would ultimately lead to a blowoff top in stocks.
Along with a continued global slowdown, a deadly virus outbreak could derail consumer spending habits across Asia that would ultimately weigh on global trade.
Most epidemics were a buying opportunity for bulls…
But given the level of excess-liquidity and extreme over-valuation today, this time could indeed be different.
The Swedish welfare state has often been praised by the left in the United States. After the migration crisis of 2015, however, when Sweden was flooded by Syrian refugee claimants, Sweden is now facing a welfare crisis that threatens the entire Swedish welfare state model.
Sweden had 9.7 million inhabitants in 2015, before it received 162,000 asylum seekers. 70% of those asylum seekers came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. 70% of those asylum seekers were also men. The migration crisis created an unsustainable financial and social situation that caused the Swedish political establishment to rethink its stance on asylum migration, which, until then, had been extremely liberal.
Asylum migration has continued, nevertheless. Between 2016 and 2018, more than 70,000 additional migrants have applied for asylum in Sweden, and more than 105,000 asylum migrants havebeengranted asylum.
There is a demographic impact from migration that affects Sweden’s national and cultural identity, as well as the crushing economic impact on Sweden’s welfare state.
The demographic impact can be seen in cities such as Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö, where people of foreign background (foreign-born or both parents born abroad) have increased from 31.9% of the population in 2002, to 45.9% of the population in 2018. There are already three Swedish municipalities where the majority of the population has a foreign background: Botkyrka, Södertälje and Haparanda. The question then becomes how to integrate foreigners if the majority of the people in a city are of a foreign background. 51% of the elementary school students in Malmö are either foreign born or both of whose parents are foreign born. Within a generation, Sweden’s third-largest city will have a population in which the majority of people are of foreign background. How will integrating immigrants take place then, and which group will be integrated into which?
Integrating migrants into Swedish society has been a failure, a situation that both experts and politicians agree on. In March 2018, 58% of registered unemployed persons were born outside Sweden, even though the group’s share of the population is only 23%. In 2018, the unemployment rate for foreign-born Swedes was 15.4%, while unemployment for Swedes born in Sweden was 3.8%.
The EBO Law (Lagen om eget boende – “Independent Living Act”) permits asylum seekers to settle anywhere in the country. Migrants often settle in areas where other migrants already have settled, partly because of the low housing prices in those areas and partly because it is easier for migrants to network there. This process both reinforces segregation and creates migrant enclaves in Sweden.
A large influx of migrants combined with a failed integration policy has created cultural consequences in which Swedish culture is both undergoing rapid change and having its identity challenged. In many areas where migrants are in the majority, there is no way to maintain Swedish culture because the population has a culture distinctly different from Sweden’s culture. This results, among other things, in changes in the language and in which holidays are publicly observed.
Several established Swedish media outlets published articles in June glorifying Eid-al-fitr, the holiday that ends the Islamic fasting month of Ramadan. Well-known companies in Sweden, such as Arla Foods, ICA and COOP, published recipes on their websites for the holiday. Several voices have already suggested that Eid-al-fitr, a Muslim holiday, should be a national holiday in Sweden. These voices have come from the Social Democrats and the Church of Sweden, two institutions that have great influence in Swedish society. Even though Eid-al-fitr has not become a national holiday, yet, severalmunicipalities choose to celebrate it.
As long as Sweden has existed as a nation, the bond to its ancestral neighbor, Finland, has been strong and Finnish has been the second most popular language here. In 2018, the linguist Mikael Parkvall noted that Arabic is now the second most popular language in Sweden. At the same time, many children born in Sweden learn Swedish so poorly that they cannot speak it properly, because there is not enough Swedish spoken in some preschools and grade schools. This change is unfolding at a rapid pace.
It is not just Swedish society that will look radically different within a decade. The Swedish welfare state, which has been the hallmark of the Swedish state known around the world, is also changing or possibly even being phased out.
The calculations underpinning Sweden’s welfare state are based on the assumption of a majority of adults employed full-time, who pay income tax to the state. What the state receives needs to be greater than what it pays out in the form of various welfare benefits and transfer payments. When a large number of people who receive welfare benefits cannot find employment or are not willing to work, there is a crisis. This is exactly what has happened in Sweden with its liberal immigration policy.
An example highlighted in Swedish media is Filipstad, a municipality with more than 10,000 inhabitants. There, the proportion of residents with a foreign background has increased from 8.5 % in 2002 to 22.7 % in 2018. Between 2012 and 2018, the domestic-born group decreased by 640 individuals, while the foreign-born group increased by 963. Those who move out of Filipstad are Swedish-born and of working age. At the same time, Filipstad’s City Manager, Claes Hultgren, is concerned that the newly arrived migrants do not have the necessary skills to enter the labor market. The consequence for municipalities such as Filipstad, is that they then must make cutbacks in the welfare services that the municipality has a responsibility to supply.
Filipstad is not the only municipality to suffer from cutbacks. According to a report from the association Sweden’s Municipalities and Regions (SKR), in 2023, there will be a deficit of 43 billion Swedish kronor (approximately $4.6 billion) in municipal and regional operations if costs increase in line with the population growth and the state does not add more resources than already planned.
The Social Democratic municipal commissioner in Strömsund, a Swedish municipality with 11,699 inhabitants, warned:
“All costs are borne by the municipalities. We have never had such low unemployment in the municipality among native-born, yet, we are on our knees, and the explanation is that we also never had such high unemployment among foreign-born. And they end up in welfare, which in practice is now, for many, life-long support.”
Charlotta Mellander, Professor of Economics at Jönköping International Business School, noted the following about the municipalities’ economic crisis:
“This is not something that happened overnight, but the municipalities’ finances have been eroded for a long time. But something that has affected the situation is the refugee reception in 2015, where, from the beginning, the municipalities that received the most had poor conditions in terms of a labor market and integration. And that has made the situation even tougher.”
At the beginning of this new decade, because of excessive migration and failed integration policies, Sweden faces radical cultural and economic changes that will fundamentally change the country.
There is ongoing Islamization in parts of Sweden and how much this Islamization will affect Swedish society is something that is influenced by the political decisions that will be made during the 2020s.
Will asylum immigration to Sweden from Muslim countries continue? Will Swedish authorities continue to support Islamic culture with tax funds? Will the immigrants adopt Swedish culture, or will the failed integration approach continue and the Swedes increasingly adopt the Islamic culture?
There are major conflicts between these two cultures, so the expansion of the Islamic culture in Sweden will doubtless create unrest of various kinds. Today, there are more contradictions between Islamic culture and Swedish culture than commonalities. Segregation is strong and mosques have been involved in scandals several times due to cultural conflicts between Islam and Swedish values.
The new decade will therefore be both unstable and decisive for Sweden, and contain major political, cultural and economic changes inescapably taking place.
Third US Coronavirus Case Confirmed In Orange County, 40 Reported In Shanghai
Hundreds of medical personnel are rushing to Wuhan following yesterday’s tragic death of Doctor Liang Wudong, of the ENT department of Hubei Xinhua Hospital, who died Saturday while fighting to suppress the virus. The South China Morning Post reports that 1,350 medics (presumably from the PLA) have already arrived in the city, and another 1,000 are expected to arrive soon.
As the number of confirmed cases surges past 2,000, China is scrambling to build not one, but two, SARS treatment-model hospitals in Wuhan (remember, Wuhan is a massive city of 11 million). Authorities have told the press that they expect both hospitals and their combined 2,300 beds to be operational within half a month.
Even though researchers have purportedly cast doubt on the theory that the coronavirus didn’t make the jump from animals to humans thanks to a shady food market that trafficking in live wild animals, officials in Beijing announced Sunday that the sale of live wild animals, including bats and snakes, at markets, supermarkets, restaurants and e-commerce platforms. But we thought eating bats was a delicacy and an ingrained cultural practice not to be criticized or stifled?
As we reported last night (Sunday morning in Beijing), health officials in Hubei Province confirmed thirteen more deaths on Saturday, while another was reported in Henan Province. Perhaps most alarmingly, last night, we learned that a patient has reportedly succumbed to the virus in Shanghai as well. In that case, the victim was an 88-year-old man who was suffering from preexisting health issues. AFP adds that 40 cases have been confirmed in the city: 37 stable, one critical, one recovered, and one (88yo man with comorbidities) died. They are also investigating 95 additional suspected cases. These weren’t the first deaths outside of Hubei, but, according to the New York Times, “the death in Shanghai, which is among China’s most populous cities and a major commercial hub, is likely to add to anxieties about the disease’s spread.”
Over in the US, officials confirmed a third case of nCoV early Sunday. The patient is being treated in isolation at a hospital in Orange County, Calif., a wealthy suburban California county known for its (relative) conservatism. The CDC notified health officials in the county that the patient had tested positive on Saturday, according to a statement obtained by CNN. The individual is said to be in “good condition”. State and federal officials are tracking down anybody who might have had contact with the patient, who recently traveled from Wuhan to the US. Two previous cases were confirmed in Illinois and Washington state.
Additionally, Japan confirmed its fourth case of infection, Thailand confirmed its 8th case, Hong Kong confirmed its sixth case and Macau confirmed three new cases overnight. Paris has cancelled a Lunar New Year parade
AFP reported the Shanghai cases late yesterday in the US, but the American press has, for some reason, neglected to emphasize, or even mention, this alarming factoid. We suspect it could have something to do with the stock market.
Across China, 688 new cases of the virus were diagnosed on Saturday. Some experts suspect that Beijing is concealing the true number of confirmed cases for fear of sparking ‘social panic’, just like the leadership did during the SARS outbreak in 2003 (which is what necessitated all of their promises of “transparency” in the first place).
This would also partially explain the vast discrepancies in case counts between the WHO, and media organizations like SCMP, which has consistently led the world in confirming new cases.
Regardless of the circumstances, Beijing’s first priority will always be ‘maintain social stability’ – no matter the cost, in lives or money. As one twitter wit argued, it looks like the medical field is going to have to learn this lesson the hard way.
Nobody trusts Chinese economic data but everybody is now relying on their healthcare data…
the medical field is going to learn this the hard way, the same way the finance community has had to
Despite all this, Pope Francis weighed in on the outbreak on Sunday, praising China’s efforts to contain the outbreak, and praying for the dead and the sick.
“I would like also to be close and to pray for the people who are sick because of the virus that has spread through China,” Francis told tens of thousands of onlookers gathered in St. Peter’s Square for his weekly homily and blessing. “May the Lord welcome the dead into his peace, comfort families and sustain the great commitment by the Chinese community that has already been put in place to combat the epidemic.”
Across Asia, prices of protective facemasks have stayed elevated amid rampant price-gouging.
There were a few updates on China’s expanding lockdown overnight. The eastern province of Shandong, with a population of 100 million, is the latest to announce that it will suspend long-distance bus service, following similar announcements in Tianjin, Beijing and Xi’an. Sunday marks the beginning of a ban on all private vehicles traveling through Wuhan as authorities expand the quarantine/lockdown, which will remain in place indefinitely until the outbreak is truly ‘contained’. Amid the lockdown, South Korea, the US, Russia, France and other governments have hatched plans to evacuate their citizens from Wuhan.
At least two Chinese provinces and three cities have ordered citizens to wear face masks in public, according to Al Jazeera.
And as Wuhan continues to suffer from a withering shortage of medical supplies, one resident told the AFP that the entire city has been infected with a pervasive despair.
“In the past week, we’ve not been able to go out and buy anything to eat,” Mashal Jamalzai, a political science student from Afghanistan told AFP. “We want to be evacuated as soon as possible, because their the virus, the hunger or the fear will kill us.”
The measure is required in the provinces of Guangdong in the south and Jiangxi in the centre, plus the eastern city of Nanjing, Ma’anshan city in Anhui province and Xinyang city in Henan, according to local authorities.
After Friday’s selloff, we imagine investors will be paying close attention to news out of Wuhan as it completely overshadows other ‘important’ domestic news stories, like the Dems impeachment debacle, or the fact that Bernie Sanders is now on track to win Iowa and New Hampshire.
