Posted on 04/17/2003 2:40:50 AM PDT by TigerLikesRooster
A sick China could cripple Asian growth
William Pesek Jr. Bloomberg News
Wednesday, April 16, 2003
TOKYO If you want to freak out people in subway cars around Asia, cough. Need to clear out an elevator? Sneeze. Care to have your own row in a movie theater? Start clearing your throat.
Such is life in a region now synonymous with the SARS epidemic. As severe acute respiratory syndrome spreads in Asia - and many other parts of the globe - it is increasingly weighing on the region's economies and markets.
Hong Kong is such a ghost town that Cathay Pacific Airways is wondering when to ground all flights. Newspapers there print articles estimating how many times residents are washing their hands. Some taxi drivers avoid customers not wearing surgical masks. Restaurants and hotels are all but empty.
"Woody Allen would feel at home in Hong Kong," says Andy Xie, the Hong Kong-based chief economist at Morgan Stanley Asia.
Xie's crack about Hollywood's best-known director of neurotics and hypochondriacs contains an element of seriousness. "I can't feel what it's like elsewhere," Xie explains. "I am stuck. All of the people in Hong Kong are effectively grounded."
That mainland China is beginning to experience a similar sense of neurosis and isolation is a far bigger concern to Xie and his peers. Asian countries have increasingly hitched their hopes for economic prosperity to China. If SARS derails the region's most vibrant economy at a time when large industrialized ones are coughing and wheezing, Asia's export-dependent countries are in trouble.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
They told me that since Asia is the primary market, the Aussies may actually just stop fishing and stop production - due to various Asian ports of entry flat out being closed off.
There, by extension, you have effects to the Australian fishing industry, and by further extension, the U.S. secondary market has no "cray tails" to sell.
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