When you are locked in your home for weeks, with no income, and people are dying in the streets, guess what happens to retail sales.
Bloomberg reports China Car Sales Tumble 92% in First Half of February on Virus
China car sales plunged 92% during the first two weeks of February in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak, according to the China Passenger Car Association. It was even worse in the first week, with nationwide sales tumbling 96% to a daily average of only 811 units, PCA said in a report released earlier this week. Deliveries this month may slump by about 70%, resulting in a 40% drop in the first two months of 2020, it said. The figures exclude minivans. The situation isexpected to improve in the third week of Februarycompared with the start of the month, PCA Secretary General Cui Dongshu said in an interview on Friday.
Improvement Expected
To what?
From here, down 50% or even 90% is an “improvement”
People have had no income for weeks.
I highly doubt buying cars is on their minds.
Economically Speaking
From an economic standpoint, January saw the Largest Shipping Decline Since 2009 and That’s Before Coronavirus impact hit.
Supply chain disruptions have barely started.
It is impossible to estimate the full impact as long as cases are spreading. Worse yet, cases are exponentially rising outside of China.
With that in mind, there’s Little Chance of Coronavirus Containment in South Korea where cases are rising exponentially.
Talk of car sales “improvement” seems more than a bit ridiculous.
Mike “Mish” Shedlock
Did globalization just mean ‘Made in China’? Smart people, actually smart people, would realize that having only one supplier is just asking for trouble.
After this is over, whenever that is, I can see supply lines being reshuffled all over the world.
The whole goal of financialization, has been to take control of economic resources AWAY FROM smart people. And hand it to the undifferentiated mass of incompetent mediocrities beholden to money printers, who are cluttering up so called “financial centers.”
Not relying on China as a sole supplier, means paying a little bit more. In a free, or even halfway so, world, that little extra is worth it, as an insurance against the inevitable supply disruptions which will occasionally happen to anyone dependent on a single supplier.
But when the money printers will respond to any negative effect of supply disruption by bailing out the not so smart ones, in order to “save the joooobs”, “prevent the syyyyystem from colaaaapsing” and other such childish nonsense, being smart enough to effectively diversify, no longer pays off. Instead, blind trust in, and allegiance to, the money printers, do. As intended.
Then compound that, by economically, and legally, illiterate “IP” laws, doing it’s darnedest to ensure there is only one single supplier of everything; the fact that the money required to bail out the idiot “job creators,” has to come from someone, meaning those less idiotic; and the fact that the tiny difference in cash flow resulting from smart people paying a tiny little it more for a more diversified supply chain, is turned into several orders of magnitude greater purchasing power by central bank backed fractional reserving. That’s how you end up where we are today: An undifferentiated mass of utter idiots, sitting around New York, London and Davos, five year planning (or two year, five is too complimecated for those intellectually limited to counting one, two, many….) how increasingly all of humanity’s scarce resources are to be utilized.
With the rest; dumb, pliant and indoctrinated enough to believe the children’s fairytale; that the halfwits enriched by the central banks, are somehow “smart,” simply for having received bigger welfare checks than most others; cheering for ever more of the same transfers of resource control to the same utter morons who are controlling, hence wasting as that’s all they know how, them already.
We make electronics hardware, with lots of parts originating in China and we have had lead times for a number of critical parts already push out multiple weeks. A friend at another local tech company will run out of product in two months. And we are small. Cannot imagine what is happening to carmakers and phone makers.
But don’t worry, nothing to see here.
As the number of cases approaches 100,000 I’ll keep in mind that means out of 10,000 people in China, 9,999 of them do not have the coronavirus.
….9,999 probably don t have it ….yet
Tis but a flesh wound.
Get ready for a slew of bad economic numbers. Not just in China but elsewhere (even if virus mostly contained to Asia) as economy has become global.
A “flesh wound”, in the fleshy part of the heart.
Didn’t you know the virus was just going to be a temporary blip on the world economy? Commons sense would dictate that not producing anything would be a drag on GDP, but the experts, who understand everything way better than we simple folks, say it isn’t so.
Until the production of broad money is affected, there is no reason why metrics measuring those, which is all empirical “economics” deal in, should be unduly effected.
Greta (and her handlers) must be thrilled.
So are their landlords showing up in a trashbag and kicking them out? Imagine the mastercard lawsuits and evictions they’d try pulling in the US. All electronically filed,of course, so they dont have to get out in the public. LOL.
at least it isn’t as bad as the flu
“Community spread” happening in multiple countries–best time for “pandemic” announcement Friday pm or Saturday. Are you feeling solid about holding stocks over the weekend?
Sounds like you’ve been missing a lot of work lately.
Well not really Bob. I wouldnt say I’ve been missing it.
I have already pointed out that Covid-19 virus is very very dangerous because of the non symptomatic bearers.
Let us hope that people having recovered have been able to create some specific immunity against the virus.
I just read that a patient which had recovered tested positive again during his quarantine (14 days) imposed when he returned home.
It seems very difficult to produce something that is an exchange for productivity(money) when no production is taking place.
At that point you are just a digital paper factory.
There are interesting times ahead.