It is the flow of people, as much as money, that keeps the global economy ticking over. It follows that a sudden halt to the movement of workers, shoppers and tourists should worry us just as much as the drying up of credit during the global financial crisis in 2008.A little over a decade ago, it was the US housing market that soured. Investors lost confidence after years of unbridled lending and poor regulation, and an American credit crunch went global.
Where people go and don't go matters because this is where the economic damage is caused. That comes not from the virus itself - absent a demographic hit on the scale of the 1918 Spanish flu - but from the measures to contain the outbreak, and the fear it sows among populations. It's a salutary reminder of just how central the flow of humans is to the world economy, from students in Australia and tourists in Paris to farmers-turned-factory workers in China's cities. The increase in those movements in recent decades makes the shock of an abrupt standstill all the more stark.
Provided there is no fresh surge of cases, manufacturing will come back. Restoring human mobility globally will take longer.
You should thank WuhanCoronavirus for that
HK_not_safe Thanks for China exporting WuhanCoronavirusOutbreak to be a pandemic. Wha tv do you compare this job to a nuclear war?
Amazing admission that our economic is little more than an immigration Ponzi scheme.