If you were listening to the economic talking heads across the news desks of the world, you would be forgiven for thinking the “coronavirus” singlehandedly collapsed the fragile global system by infecting and killing off every one of the key decision-makers. So how does a mid-level flu-like virus wipes trillions of dollars off stocks and bonds on most of the important bourses, or is it the virus?
Did it cause the current petrol price war between the Saudis and the Russians?
Did it magically produce a fully functional and mature oil junk bond market? A fast collapsing market much like the housing market, reminiscent of the 2008 global “meltdown?”
Did it magically conjure up a 10-year fracking/shale industry in America that is 10-years in the making, energy, and cash negative?
Did it cause the price crash of Saudi-Aramco, the most expensive company in the world by wiping $500 billion off its share price from an all=time high of close on $2 Trillion?
Did it somehow cause Italy to become one of the most indebted countries in the world, with an outstanding debt of $4 Trillion, for an economy that has not seen meaningful growth in 18-years, notwithstanding its Covid-19 issues as we speak?
Did it retrospectively cause Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, so puffed up with American hubris apropos globalization, that they outsourced almost 98% of their “Big Pharma” capacity in respect of key chemical ingredients to China, the very country that the coronavirus first struck and who are now struggling with their productive capacities on account of the strategies of “quarantining?”
Did it cause the Russian Federation to hoard so much gold over the past 20-years? Keep its oil production costs low at $7 per barrel versus the Americans $52 per barrel and reduce its sovereign debt so much, it can comfortably ride out the existing global crisis for much, much longer than the other Western economies?
Did it cause the current global “demand-side” and “supply-side” shock?
Did it cause the Western central banks to decrease interests rates to negative territories and flood the fast bleeding markets already heavily indebted with still cheaper money?
Did it cause greedy American investors to ignore investing in renewable energy sources and instead opt to borrow more than a trillion dollars to invest in the most expensive energy sector in history, the fracking/shale industry, under the delusional guise of seeking “energy independence?”
Did it push the American economy so close to the precipice of collapse; we may in all likelihood see the much-predicted demise of the mighty dollar as the global “reserve currency within the next year or so?”
Now unless I have lost my ability to reason which may be a possibility considering the voodoo economics of such a brazen “shell game” that the billionaire oligarchs routinely pull on us the public that I no longer understand basic economic fundamentals?
Imagine the epithet of at the death of the planet; “here lies Earth, a once-mighty “pale blue” rock in the Solar System, ruled by an intelligent species so avariciously greedy over an instrument they produced in unlimited numbers for the sole benefit of a limited number, killed off by an inanimate thing they didn’t see coming?”
