‘Sharp and Short-Lived’: The Impact of Health Scares on Markets
- Coronavirus in Asia evokes memory of SARS, other health scares
- Difficult to isolate epidemics from other global events
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Reports of a respiratory virus spreading from China to the U.S. sent investors looking to prior health scares for guidance on how much market fallout to brace for.
As stocks wobbled around the world after the virus was blamed for six deaths in China and a case was confirmed in the U.S., traders looked back at past outbreaks, from Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) 17 years ago to the Ebola scare in 2014. Those cases hint that even when the human toll risks becoming grim, financial markets have shown resilience.