Claims by the US president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo that the disease started in a lab in Wuhan, and that those responsible would be held to account, overshadowed a further slowing of infections and deaths from Covid-19.
The warning fanned worries of a return to the trade standoff between the world's top two economies that battered global markets last year until a partial agreement was reached in December. He added that"while the market is already factoring in a less globalised world during the initial phase of the post-pandemic recovery as economies internalise, rekindling a dormant US-China trade war will likely make any economic improvement exponentially more difficult. And ripping up the trade agreement will trigger a global equity market rout."
"My concern is that the market has priced in all that optimism before we have confronted the worst of the bad news on the economy and on some industries and earnings," Michael Jones at Caravel Concepts LLC told Bloomberg TV.