Of course this sudden decline is being mostly driven by fear of the coronavirus. The rapid spread of the virus in South Korea, Italy and Iran over the weekend really rattled investors, and there was a rush to sell stocks when the markets opened on Monday morning. And the worse this pandemic becomes, the lower stock prices are going to go. You see, the truth is that stock prices are primarily based on what investors believe the future is going to look like.

For a long time, investors have assumed that the future would be exceedingly bright, and stock prices have steadily trended upwards. But a coronavirus pandemic changes everything. If worldwide economic activity comes to a standstill like we are already seeing happen in China, it is inevitable that there will be a very serious global economic downturn. And this outbreak comes at a time when stock prices have been more overvalued than they have ever been before in American history. Most stocks have been priced “beyond perfection”, and so it was just a matter of time before those prices started to fall.

In China, people are deathly afraid to leave their homes right now, and that has caused economic activity to come to a crashing halt. In fact, during the first portion of this month vehicle sales in China were down 92 percent… As The Epoch Times reported late last week, for example, sales of Chinese passenger vehicles has tanked a whopping 92 percent “on an annual basis the first 16 days of February,” according to the China Passenger Car Association.

Sales of passenger vehicles only amounted to 4,909 units during the first 16 days of the month, the organization reported, which fell from 59,930 vehicles sold over the same period a year ago. These are the first figures to demonstrate just how hard the Wuhan coronavirus is hitting the world’s largest auto market. And at this point even Chinese President Xi Jinping is admitting that this outbreak will “have a relatively big impact on the economy and society”.

And President Trump is certainly doing his best to keep everyone feeling optimistic. The following is what he tweeted on Monday… The Coronavirus is very much under control in the USA. We are in contact with everyone and all relevant countries. CDC & World Health have been working hard and very smart. Stock Market starting to look very good to me! Hopefully President Trump is correct. And hopefully he is also correct when he claims that this pandemic will start to subside once warmer weather arrives. But so far this mysterious new coronavirus is winning the battle, and investors all over the globe are really starting to freak out.

It was the first time that the two sides have met to work together on deciding which areas Israel will extend sovereignty to, a measure tantamount to annexation. “The mapping is underway to prepare the way for extending sovereignty on these territories,” Netanyahu declared as the two delegations huddled together under temporary shelters amid pouring rain at the West Bank settlement of Ariel, where the meeting was held. “We will do this as soon as possible,” the prime minister said.

The Palestinians have rejected the US peace plan, which envisions the creation of a Palestinian state in about 70 percent of the West Bank, a small handful of neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, most of Gaza and some areas of southern Israel — if the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state, disarm Hamas and other terror groups in the coastal enclave, and fulfill other conditions.

The plan allows Israel to annex settlements, grants the Jewish state sovereignty over the Jordan Valley and overriding security control west of the Jordan River, and bars Palestinian refugees from settling in Israel. Israel has welcomed the proposal.

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.

The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

A single square kilometre (0.3 square miles) of desert locusts holds about 40 million insects that can eat as much as 35,000 people in a single day. A swarm the size of Paris can eat as much as half the population of France and a swarm the size of New York City can devour the combined total of New York’s and California’s populations.

The locusts, a species known as desert locust, are already mature and have laid their eggs. As the eggs hatch, the short-horned grasshoppers are likely to spread into neighbouring countries. FAO said: “The situation remains extremely alarming in the Horn of Africa, especially in Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia where widespread breeding is in progress and new swarms are expected to form in the coming weeks.”

“In the past few days, there has been a significant movement of swarms over the Arabian Peninsula, unrelated to the Horn of Africa, that reached both sides of the Persian Gulf.”

When I saw a video of Chinese authorities using butterfly nets to capture sick people, it made me wonder what US authorities might do to round up those that are ill. The level of fear that a full-blown pandemic would cause would transform our society overnight. Even now, Chinese restaurants in Canada are completely empty due to concerns about catching this virus. But once this virus is being spread in virtually every city in North America, many of us won’t want to go anywhere at all, and that would bring economic activity to a complete and utter standstill.

For a while, it seemed like this outbreak was almost entirely a Chinese problem, and most Americans were not too alarmed about it. But over the weekend the rapid spread of the virus in South Korea, Italy and Iran spooked financial markets and mainstream news outlets in the US started publishing stories about this outbreak with very alarming headlines.

And those alarming headlines are justified, because experts are telling us that we could very well be on the verge of a horrifying global pandemic… Once this virus starts to spread in a community, the number of cases can explode within hours. For example, the number of confirmed cases in South Korea went from 30 to 602 in just 96 hours…

While China’s giant state-owned SOEs will likely have enough of a liquidity lifeblood to last them for 2-3 quarters, it is the country’s small businesses that are facing a head on collision with an iceberg, because according to the Nikkei, over 85% of small businesses – which employ 80% of China’s population – expect to run out of cash within three months, and a third expect the cash to be all gone within a month.

Should this happen, not only will China’s economy collapse, but China’s $40 trillion financial system will disintegrate, as it is suddenly flooded with trillions in bad loans. Now try to imagine what that might look like on a global scale.

The shooter was a far-right extremist who reportedly said he wanted to exterminate people from Asia, North Africa and Israel. The Central Council of Jews in Germany, the country’s main Jewish organization, expressed shock over the attack. The killing spree was the latest in a string of high-profile attacks by far-right extremists in recent months. Both the Yom Kippur attack on a synagogue in Halle last October and the assassination in June of a pro-refugee politician, Walter Lubcke, were carried out by assailants affiliated with the far right.

These high-profile events have happened against a backdrop of anti-Semitic attacks that officials say have been mostly motivated by far-right ideologies — not by Islamic extremists who have preoccupied most of the government’s recent anti-terrorism efforts.

“There is a much bigger problem in Germany, something that up until now was concealed,” she said. “It’s terrifying that the security agencies are a part of this process of concealment. Every country has far-right groups. In America, too. But in Germany, where National Socialism had its start, they supposedly don’t exist.”

The crisis that followed, now known as the Great Recession, created economic havoc across the globe, and it took years for the world’s economy to regain some semblance of balance. Now, another global economic disaster could be looming, this time because of the microscopic coronavirus known as Covid-19, which has infected over 72,000 people and claimed more than 2,000 lives in just a few weeks. Of course, the primary focus of the media has been on the spread of the disease and what measures different countries have put in place to contain it.

There is widespread fear that Covid-19 could eventually become a global pandemic that claims millions of lives. But this virus has the potential to be devastating in another way, too: It could result in a global economic meltdown and could severely impact the availability and cost of thousands of essential products from China.