Europe’s Stock Markets Are Slammed by Trump Travel Ban: Live Updates

Ultimately, the E.C.B. appeared largely powerless to aid markets for the simple reason that the danger at hand is different from the usual economic crisis: It is a public health emergency that may simply be beyond the usual economic policy tool kit. Low borrowing costs will not encourage people to return to offices, factories and shopping malls so long as going to such places carries real risk of contracting a dangerous virus.

Trump’s travel ban sends airfreight rates surging.

President Trump sent global stocks tumbling when he said he would suspend most travel from Europe to the United States. One market saw a surge: the price of airfreight.

Mr. Trump quickly clarified that the suspension applied only to passengers. But airfreight costs surged all the same, for shipments across the Atlantic and around the world.

More than half of the cargo crossing the Atlantic Ocean travels in the bellies of passenger jets. With a large number of passenger flights now likely to be canceled, freighter jets have become essential to moving goods quickly over the Atlantic.

“it doesn’t really matter what the cargo is,” said Peter Stallion, a freight derivatives broker at Freight Investor Services, a London trading firm. “It’s all going to be squeezed onto a very limited freighter network.”

There are a lot more passenger jets than freighter jets, and now the latter are in tight demand. Many have already been put to work on routes out of China, where most passenger air traffic was canceled weeks ago. Now that China is reopening for business, freight agents are struggling to find space on freighters.

“Within minutes of Trump’s announcement, people with freighters were inundated with requests to operate flights for the next 30 days,” said John Peyton Burnett, the managing director of TAC Index, an air cargo pricing data company in Hong Kong.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/12/business/stock-market-today.html