The virus that shut down the world

[Zorro]

Not long ago, to step through the lushly planted Green Wall at Singapore’s Changi Airport was to walk into an ever-more-globally connected future.

Millions of passengers each month rushed to and from destinations throughout the world via the most advanced travel experience on Earth — traversing Changi’s new $1 billion terminal meant checking in, dropping bags and boarding flights with just the touch of a few buttons.

Long layover? Good problem. You could linger at the airport’s Changi Jewel, with its jungle canopy and 131-foot Rain Vortex, the world’s tallest indoor waterfall. Wander up to a rooftop swimming pool and plane spot. Or leave the airport for a free tour of the ethereal towers of the city-state at the center of the world’s financial and trade systems.

But like fire through Notre Dame, the coronavirus pandemic of 2020 has now silenced this cathedral of interconnectedness — turning Changi into an emblem of what analysts say could now be a lost decade of travel, trade, investment and migration as decades of globalization give way to a new era of global distancing.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2020/world/coronavirus-pandemic-globalization/

[msongs]

1. they world is not shut down. media hysteria nt

[dalton99a]

2. Kick

Global distancing — of people, of goods, of capital — is deepening the brutal economic impact of lockdowns, fueling soaring joblessness and weakening demand. The global economy is suffering its deepest recession since World War II, according to the World Bank, with most countries experiencing downturns at one time since 1870. It’s the fourth deepest recession in the last 150 years, twice as deep as the Great Recession of the late 2000s.

Up to 100 million people globally are poised to fall into extreme poverty, the first increase since the Asian and Latin America financial crises of the 1990s, and the biggest increase since the World Bank began tracking the number in 1990.

At the onset of the pandemic, the sudden worldwide need for ventilators, masks and other personal protective equipment, coupled with the inability of companies that make everything from tractors to computers to secure parts from shuttered factories in China, caused a global mad dash to scoop up whatever substitutes could be found — often at whatever price. As factories reopen and supply chains stabilize, the experience has left countries and companies traumatized, empowering calls to bring manufacturing jobs home — or at least to spread them among more and mostly closer countries.

That could mean a new set of winners and losers. Pressure will increase on some companies to shift away from China, where growing wages and land costs have already moved jobs to lower-wage countries such as Vietnam and Indonesia. For companies targeting U.S. markets, Mexico — which sends goods across the border by land, sea and air — could see more jobs.