In a world where fear is the new normal, this crisis is truly getting scary.
If You Open It, They Will Come
April 23 (King World News) – Peter Boockvar: If you open it, will they come? That is a question the entire country will be asking over the next month as we do begin the reopening. There will be one thing to figure out the right time and what type of businesses to reopen but even when we do, will people have enough confidence to go outside and do things again. I listened to the Las Vegas Sands conference call last night, a company that has most of their operations in Macau and Singapore (and full disclosure I own it for clients and myself). They made an important distinction to what a reopening means there vs here. Basically, they’ve gone thru this before in Asia, we haven’t. Robert Goldstein, the COO, said this in the call:
“We’ve never seen this kind of a virus on our shores here in the US where we’ve kind of been taken aback and shell shocked by it. Asia has seen it numerous times, they understand it, they dealt with it.
You guys, Hong Kong is open and operating. It never closed in terms of retail and restaurants and they’re walking around with gloves and mask and sanitzers and temperature checks…They can deal with it and Macao will deal with it.”
Hong Kong has had 4 deaths in a city of about 7 million people. My point here is this, with the assumption that testing further amps up in coming weeks/months, we can do this but it will take time for Americans to ‘acclimate’ to this new world. Many in Asia have been thru something like this before.
This Crisis Is Getting Scary
…we saw some April PMI’s from overseas and they were as bad as you’d think they would be. The Australian composite PMI fell to 22.4 from 39.4 and Japan’s declined to 27.8 from 36.2. For each, it was the services side that drove most of the fall as manufacturing was already weak but not as bad.
In Europe, its April composite index plunged to 13.5 from 29.7 with the services side down to just 11.7 and manufacturing at 33.6. These are god awful numbers but what should we expect if most everything is shutdown? The UK manufacturing index fell to 32.9 from 47.8 while services are down to 12.3 from 34.5. These numbers are truly shocking only if we didn’t understand that it was self inflicted…
Billionaire Eric Sprott Buying
To find out which company billionaire Eric Sprott just bought a 12% stake in click here.
A separate gauge showed that French business confidence in April cratered to 62 from 94 and well below the estimate of 80. Also out, German consumer confidence dropped to -23.4 from +2.3. Again, should we have expected something better?
Bottom line to all of these terrible figures, I’ll say it can only get better from here as things gradually reopen but again, the pace at which it improves and the time it will take to get back to where it was will be a long drawn out process.
Michael Oliver – Gold May Go No Offer
***Also Released: Michael Oliver – We May See The Gold Market Go No Offer And Skyrocket CLICK HERE.
***To listen to one of Alasdair Macleod’s most important audio interviews ever where he discusses the perfect storm in the gold market and why “this time the situation is infinitely worse” CLICK HERE OR ON THE IMAGE BELOW.
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