The COVID-19 financial crisis

Description

[Extract]
The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word 'crisis.' One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger--but recognize the opportunity.

As of the time of writing, the COVID-19 has infected a shocking 1.3M cases globally and claimed 67K deaths. The US and the several European countries have a total of 760k cases which is slightly more than half the total number of cases globally. There are beacons of hope that countries that have been exposed to the virus at very early stages have been able to minimize the rate of infections such as Taiwan, Singapore, and Japan.

Upon receiving information that a highly infectious virus was spreading in China, the governments of these countries swiftly informed their population of the dangers and recommended social behaviours and enacted policies to minimize the spread of the contagion. It should be noted that these countries have experienced the SARS outbreak of 2003 and genuinely respect the dangers of a highly infectious disease. Of all these countries, Taiwan which had one of the earliest COVID infections in the region has less than 400 total COVID cases. Thus, from an epidemiology perspective, we do have evidence that the spread of the COVID virus can be managed and mitigated.

Financial markets have vacillated between moments of abject fear and panic versus hope and calm in response to promises of government aid and central bank intervention. They say every financial crisis is different. So what’s different about the COVID-19 2020? What are the dangers and where are the opportunities?