in many ways zero covid has been a good fling. has saved lives in china. it s stemmed massive and major outbreaks from taking over the entire country. but it s also come at a very steep cost. about 20 million people in china right now are under strict lockdown, and many economists say that zero covid has led to factory closures, supply chain disruptions, and the biggest hit of all, domestic consumption. earlier today i spoke to a senior economist at oxford economics. his name is tommy wu. we have his statement up. and this is what he told me with his analysis of today s gdp numbers. he said, in regards to zero covid, the zero covid approach affects consumption, especially demand for services. he goes on to say from an economic perspective it s better to have some sort of an easing in restrictions but we know the reality is that zero tolerance will very likely stay until the end of this year, the earliest. now, the eurasia group placed china s zero covid policy at the very top of it
The start of the Beijing Winter Olympics in early February and the possibility of power cuts are further clouding the ability of manufacturers to predict output levels.
good to have you. great to join you. so inflation has not grown this fast since i was born, literally. that s how long it has been. so is it here to stay? i mean, that s the important question, right. if i knew the answer to that question, i would be a very, very rich woman. the real issue is that it looks like the forces behind inflation early on were, as you pointed out earlier, transitory. they were the result of reopening pains, that everybody wanted to start buying things at the same time and the global supply chains were not prepared, they were still quite fragile and dealing with factory closures and port congestion and other problems. and it looked like those kinds of bottlenecks would clear pretty quickly. that hasn t happened. and that hasn t happened for a number of reasons. of course we ve had several new variants, two in particular that have been problematic since some of those forecasts were made,
bottoming and rebounding. i m not suggesting this will run its course for two weeks and than we ll stop talking about but that is a better playbook than selling everybody because i m afraid that the new variant is more transmissible or higher hospitalization rates. we don t know anything yet. so i think the important thing is to stay calm. could this temporary bad news that spooks the market, dan, be a positive in the broader sense of the economy? we ve talked about the overheated demand, gas prices and suddenly people might say, i m not going to go out as much. i m going to play it safer. could that temper the prices that keep going up? yeah, that is on the consumer side and then on the corporate side. i know that we ve spent a lot of time talking about the bottlenecks in supply chain andin nation concerns, a lot of that have to do with factory closures or access to energy or other costs of energy and then obviously shipping. so put all of that stuff together, what a new variant
a federal court found that actions by walgreens boots alliance, cvs, and walmart helped create an oversupply of addictive opioid pills. the scale of compensation will be decided at a future hearing. shares in the retailer gap sank 15% in late trading on tuesday, after the firm announced a $152 million loss for the third quarter. gap blamed supply chain issues and factory closures for the disappointing results. to turkey now, where the country s currency, the lira, hit a new record low on tuesday after falling 15%. investors are less than impressed by president erdogan s decision to back a controversial plan to cut interest rates. the lira has fallen for 11 straight days and is trading at around 13 to the us dollar. turkey is also struggling with rising prices,