The notion that the Fed and other central banks will be able to ride to the rescue with the injection of still more cash is becoming ever more threadbare.
In the first place, however much money is injected into the markets it cannot bring about the resumption of transport or restart production lines. Moreover, having reduced interest rates to historic lows in the decade since the 2008 crisis -- in some cases to negative levels -- the central banks have little capacity to provide still more stimulus.
The coronavirus is a natural disaster. But like all such events it has exposed the advanced level of decay in the social and economic relations of the global capitalist system.
Firstly, it is revealing the inadequacies of health care systems around the world, which have been eviscerated by years of austerity cuts. Secondly, the virus outbreak is again demonstrating the inherent fragility of a financial and economic system geared entirely to the amassing of wealth for the upper echelons of society.
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