by Karl Denninger
Market-Ticker.org
Ready to have a spazz yet?
Well, I hope you are to at least a small degree.
China has now locked down at least one and perhaps as many as three cities — large ones too — over their latest outbreak of coronavirus. This has almost-certainly jumped to the United States and the odds that it is contained “over there” in China are nearly zero, given that we’ve got at least one person hospitalized here.
We don’t have an accurate mortality rate for this thing yet. The one guarantee I can make is that the Chinese are freaking out in that they’re locking down travel right in front of the Chinese New Year, which is their traditional travel time and a huge source of tourism revenue. For them to basically shut down cities and leisure activities, including Macau, into the maw of this period of time means they’ve got a problem they don’t have a handle on and it’s worse than they’re reporting, perhaps by a lot.