U.S. alone: 8,200 dead! 140,000 hospitalized! Deadly virus spreads from state to state and has infected 15 million Americans so far.

[JW Insider]

44 minutes ago, James Thomas Rook Jr. said:

If someone stops buying your stuff ... sell to somebody else.

This should not reduce production ... it only increases the marketing costs to new customers

That wouldn't help the trade deficit with China if they stopped buying American stuff, and Americans still bought their stuff. It would merely increase that deficit.

Of course, if Americans were to also stop buying their stuff, that would help the deficit. But then, where would Walmart be? Where would millions of Walmart employees be? To be price-competitive with Walmart, Amazon also relies heavily on China for product.to sell. Apple, too. So, prices go up due to not being able to rely on low cost labor from China, and some products will go up in price due the high "barriers of entry" to start up manufacturing in other places, or begin relying on them.

You might be looking at the angle of America continuing to produce as much as it does and sell to new markets. If there is currently a $100b/year potential selling American products to Chinese markets, where is the replacement market for $100b/yr product going to come from, no matter how much more is spent on marketing? Britain has fought wars with China to force them to buy drugs (esp, opium) from British sources. The US has fought wars, but mostly just fighting through financial leverage, to force countries to advertise and sell American cigarette brands. In the age of the Internet this is nearly impossible to pull off so easily, so that it costs even more (militarily) to force a regime change or otherwise force a country to buy American products.

[Anna]

Dr. Nancy Messonnier, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases Regarding the novel Coronavirus: "The virus “has demonstrated the capacity to spread globally"

Is it just me, or is that a really stupid statement. I mean surely ANY virus that is inside a host, and the host travels from one side of the globe to the other, will have the same capacity? (Don't blame the virus).

 

[Health and Medicine]

‘It’s just the flu’