Le premier ministre japonais shinzoAbe ordonne la fermeture des écoles à partir du 2 mars en raison de craintes autour du coronavirus

I think many people are looking at rates of infection and morbidity rates, which won't give us the true picture of the impact to the global economy and to the stock market, which is (crudely) for which many of us are looking for answers.
 
My take:
 
The virus likely has a much lower morbidity rate than the 2% in Wuhan, but the cases were never identified and reported correctly, and they sent people home or people avoided leaving home to deal with it themselves (h/t muscleman for some insight as well). Anyone at the beginning of the crisis that died of pneumonia like symptoms probably was ruled as a death from other sources. Regardless the morbidity rate at the beginning was skewed by the hospital cases, similar to the morbidity rates for people hospitalized for the flu in the US (8-12%, per CDC).
 
This spiked up morbidity rate clearly spooked the world, and the unknown nature of this virus is enough to scare everyone, so everyone freaked..but the market remained sanguine for two reasons...one, the Fed is in the midst of a massive asset buying spree, the repo markets are wide open, and liquidity has pushed markets into a blow-off top since Powell declared, for all intents and purposes, that the Fed has the markets' back during his Fed press conference in September. China also clamped down hard on the virus, trying to contain it, and, through surprising transparency, shared a lot of data with counterparts in the US, Canada, Europe and Australia, where the first full mapping of the virus' RNA was completed within a few days of receiving the virus sample itself.
 
While the markets drank the Fed Kool Aid, the tanker and dry bulk markets showed a different story. Rates plummeted, even in the face of IMO 2020 standards for tankers, which basically docked a large percentage of "dirty" tankers, to be upgraded with scrubbers that would reduce sulfur (?) emissions during their travels with petroleum products in a bid for global trade. This should have been the perfect recipe for a massive breakout from a 12 year bear market for rates, and the stocks soared from September to January in anticipation of it. Coronavirus clamped that down. China wasn't receiving their deliveries. The country shut down, stockpiles have built up, and demand for petroleum products declined 25% plus.
 
The market factored all these things in, and banked on a huge stimulus in China to keep the party going. South Korea dented those prospects, but Iran, and especially Italy, broke the whole thesis down. The moment a bunch of villages near Milan became a prime cluster outside China, all bets of containment were off. In the meantime, we have seen the market reach the apex of a massive blow-off top after a nearly 11 year bull market from the March 6, 2009 bottom. The last 4-5 years have resulted in P/E valuations doubling (or more) for the biggest companies in the S&P 500 (https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/AAPL/apple/pe-ratio), the massive move to index investing (https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/19/passive-investing-now-controls-nearly-half-the-us-stock-market.html), and the retail investor returning to the market over the last couple of years (see the increased interest in Bitcoin, Tesla, r/wsb, etc.).
 
We were likely due for a large market decline when Powell pulled the plug on asset purchses (he declared mid Q2 2020, so let's say April), and that would have likely pushed us down 20%, like the Fed pivot of 2018. Once you factor in the coronavirus, how much further could we fall? Not only should we see the "p" of the p/e ratio fall, but we will also see the "e" fall too (see MSFT today).
 
Bottom line: IMHO, this is only the beginning. I was holding out hope, but that Italian outbreak changed it all. The Greek fashion designer who contracted it during her time at Milan Fashion Week means that cases will likely pop up everywhere, especially larger markets.
 
Anyways, I think people shouldn't be evaluating this from the morbidity rates, etc (I am guilty of doing this when we were transfixed by what was happening in China, and far from everywhere else). They should evaluate the destruction of capital flows and trade, and how much wealth that destroys. The destruction of wealth could mean a steeper decline. But the banks are better capitalized, so the upswing should be equally dramatic, whenever that will be. This is going to get much more ugly (consider if the Olympics are cancelled), and I think S&P 2,500 could be in the cards...but I could also see a massive upswing in the summer, when coordinated global stimulus pushes things higher, faster. We shouldn't be comparing this crisis to SARS or any other modern pandemic threat. This should be compared to the 1918 influenza outbreak and the subsequent 1919-1921 market crash and depression.

Nokia serait en train de réfléchir à son avenir en explorant plusieurs options, selon les informations obtenues par Bloomberg, notamment des cessions voire un adossement ou un rapprochement, le nom d'Ericsson étant évoqué. Le Finlandais aurait embauché des conseils pour l'aider dans sa démarche. A ce stade, et selon la formule consacrée, il n'y a aucune certitude qu'une opération sera annoncée. Espérons seulement que les Européens sauront protéger leur fleuron de la concurrence d'Huawei et des appétits américains.