At this point, we're mulling over these two (broad) scenarios:
1.) Chinese authorities were spooked by a new viral outbreak, they didn't know which way it would go, they recalled the SARS outbreak in 2003, they perhaps suspected a leak or some vaccine trial-related connection from their BSL-4 lab there in Wuhan, then they 'overreacted' out of an abundance of caution. Crucially though, the Chinese central govt took over the containment process and strategically facilitated the international broadcast of the worst possible scenes from Wuhan and Hubei Province. This was done to amplify panic across the world and force Western govts, particularly the US, to attempt to mimic the Chinese response, in the expectation that Western govts would be nowhere near as organized, authoritarian and equipped as China was to 'contain the virus'. Stock markets crash, business is lost (and much of it is not regained after things 'return to normal'), and Chinese companies move in to take over market share vacated by Western interests. Thus, China 'strikes back' economically against US-led anti-Chinese trade sanctions and quickens its supplanting of the US at the head of the table of 'world government'.
In this scenario, Russia appears to 'get the game' early on by closing its territorial border to China and preventing any Chinese from even flying into the country. China quietly reports that it has no problem with that, but the rest of the world is reinforced with the message that 'this is really serious'. Amidst this, Russia unexpectedly disagrees with Saudi Arabia and OPEC to discontinue oil production cutbacks, sending oil prices plummeting, thereby hammering the US domestic oil market. Apparently completely unrelated to the 'pandemic', this move would thereby be a complementary economic action taken as part of a broader 'Chinese-Russian strategic partnership'.
Heck, in this scenario, maybe even Iran was doing its part to amplify the scare.
2.) One major assumption in the above scenario is that the West is being genuinely hurt economically by this 'shutdown'. Yes, production will plummet for a period, many tens or hundreds of thousands of workers in service sectors will be laid off, and tax receipts to govt coffers will briefly shrink. But are the fundamentals really affected to such an extent that Western elites cannot shuffle things around and manage them, thereby avoiding 'blood on the streets'? Cross-border trade is continuing as normal, supermarket shelves will remain stocked (despite initial panic-buying), all workers have been promised compensation, all companies (major, 'connected' ones anyway) have been promised remuneration in the form of favorable loans, tax cuts, etc.
So you ask 'How does a govt pay for all that, when they've been telling us for years that they're broke and we must all tighten our belts?' Because that isn't true! Govts will just do what they always do; issue bonds against future tax receipts, thereby leveraging future generations. $1.5 trillion injected here, €2 trillion injected there... whatever, they just print money when they have to. So long as the real economy of people and infrastructure remains functional, the 'fake economy' of the casino stock markets and banking system, which is fundamentally decoupled from the real world, can be massaged and 'restructured'. So long as crises aren't really crises, govts love them! 'Finally, we're relevant to people again!'
So if they're not worried about imminent economic collapse, are they then worried about this virus? No, they have realized by now as we have that it's a nothing-burger. BUT, individual, national govts are using the crisis to suppress incipient rebellions (France, for example), and stave off power transfers (Netanyahu in Israel, for example, or Sinn Fein being kept out of govt in Ireland) - and overall, collectively, they will use the crisis to 're-set' or reconfigure things such that greater 'medical martial law' can be instituted and so that greater centralization of the levers of the Western banking system/economy can be instituted.
They'll later say, in a few months or whenever they're looking back at what everyone by then knows was a nothing-burger, 'well, it was good to stress-test the system in the event of a real pandemic', and 'so many good laws have been introduced thanks to the non-crisis that we're all now better off for it'.
In sum, the net result will have been that the elites simply took their greed for money and control over people up a notch or two, and that the increased controls in people's lives - which is really draconian right now, and will presumably lessen in the months ahead, but will likely retain many of its psychological if not its actual features - will produce increased suffering and misery, though not necessarily of the physical kind (assuming govts want to keep their heads and not see food riots in the streets).
The Cs said the creative energy of the universe is transduced by humans as they go about the ordinary 'psycho-drama' of their lives. That which is not expressed outwardly 'goes within', apparently into the planet itself, producing or contributing to such natural phenomena as earthquakes. The significant stoppage of (and/or reduction in) human creative expression is the wildcard in all of this. What if, for example, the suppression of human activity produces or contributes to that 'Big One' earthquake they talk of in California? Something like that would then give the US govt a REAL crisis for which no amount of shuffling numbers around on central bank computer screens can fix. Only then would China 'step up' as a 'new hegemon'.
As such then, in this second scenario, what's going on now is more of the same - manipulated crises and manipulated solutions to effectively lock things down even more. But in their hubris, the elites have likely gone too far and broken not 'the economy' but something more akin to 'the people's spirit', thus bringing us closer to catastrophe because they don't understand that humans are not robotic resources to be endlessly poked and prodded - they have a human-cosmic connection that brings a higher power into 'the equation', one which will smash their 'eternal global economic lockdown' to pieces.
FWIW this makes sense to me and is in line with my thinking about it in the last few days.
