With Chinese New Year starting tomorrow, bringing in the year of the rat, Asia clearly smells one with regional markets ignoring a positive overnight session on Wall Street and marking equities sharply lower today. The coronavirus outbreak in China is obviously the culprit. The fall-out of SARS in 2003 remains at the top of Asian investors’ minds. News that China has effectively quarantined the entire city of Wuhan – a city of 11 million people and the source of the outbreak – has rattled markets regionally. The timing has been imperfect, to say the least, with hundreds of millions of people moving around China and ... (full story)