by Nathan McDonald, Sprott Money:

Things are accelerating fast, as the markets finally come to the same realization I reached over a month ago: the coronavirus will have a massive economic impact that could possibly send the world into a severe recession.

The reasons for this have been well documented through my last number of articles. However, it bears reiterating that tourism, global travel, and the vital supply chains that so many companies now rely on in this new age of globalism will be severely impacted, possibly even crippled, as this virus continues to spread across the world.

Many people are starting to become fearful, and they are buying whatever form of protection that they can, most notably protective masks with ratings of N95 or higher, despite the fact it has been proven these do not fully protect a person from contracting the coronavirus.

Still, anything helps, and you cannot blame people for attempting to get ahead of the curve before these masks sell out across North America as they have in other countries such as China, South Korea, and any other region heavily impacted by the virus.

On websites such as Amazon and eBay, we can see people attempting to sell these face masks for outrageous prices, a common tactic in times of crisis. Anything reasonably priced has been sold out for days.

Wall Street, which has blissfully ignored the spread of the virus for weeks, finally woke up on Monday morning, realizing that this crisis is not going away—and is indeed here to stay for many months to come.

This caused prices of stocks to absolutely tank throughout the trading week, resulting in losses that are truly historic given the short period of time in which they occurred. Trillions of dollars have been wiped off the books, resulting in staggering losses.

The drop throughout this week was so severe that we have to go all the way back to 1928, days before the Great Depression began, to find a comparable scenario.

(Charts via google.com)

Even at the time of writing—Thursday, February 27th—markets continue to nosedive, with the S&P 500 Index dropping by 2.25% and the Dow Jones Industrial Average plummeting by 2.41%.

These drops come after days of already-heavy losses, compounding the pain and leading to additional selling by those who are fearful.

To make matters worse, we now have a number of stories hitting the airwaves about how numerous senior officials have contracted the coronavirus, such as the Iranian Vice President for women and family affairs, Masoumeh Ebtekar, and Iran’s former ambassador to the Vatican, Hadi Khosroshahi, who passed away due to the virus.

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