And some of the biggest numpties were on here predicting stocks would ALWAYS go up because there had been no MASSIVE GLOBAL FINANCIAL CRISIS for a milleniuma century 10 YEARS!!
This Time Is Not Different!!
The signals from asset classes outside of equities foretold the coronavirus threat
By Neil Irwin For weeks, there has been a strange divergence among those trying to predict what coronavirus might mean for financial markets and the world economy.
People in the trenches of global commerce — supply chain managers, travel industry experts, employers large and small — warned of substantial disruptions to their businesses. And public health authorities feared that the disease could spread far beyond Wuhan in China.
Yet financial markets and most economic forecasters projected the virus outbreak wouldn't do much harm to the economy and corporate profits— at the least, nothing that an interest-rate cut or two from the Federal Reserve couldn't fix. The S&P 500 hit a new high last Wednesday.
After reports of people infected with the virus in the major economies of South Korea and Italy, the more pessimistic view began to prevail across major world markets.
On Tuesday, selling in stocks slowed initially, before accelerating to close around 3 per cent lower on fresh warnings about how the virus will affect the United States.
There remains huge uncertainty about how widely the virus will spread and how much damage it will do. But the financial world is realising just how much is at stake— and how different this is from other recent hiccups in the global economy, notably last year's trade war between the United States and China.
