This is the Tom Hartman Program.

And welcome to our program.

Tom Hartman here with you. There's so much going on we're going to get into today.

There's kind of a two-part story here

that I want to share with you having to do with this Wuhan virus and what kind of impact it

might have if China essentially shuts down a lot of their manufacturing.

As has already happened in the Wuhan area, we don't know how much of the manufacturing done in

Wuhan is manufacturing that ends up done for internal domestic use.

And I'm guessing it's probably more the latter than the former because

Wuhan is interior and a lot of the manufacturing

that's used by American companies are along the coast where the stuff that's

made can be easily transported to the sea coast put on ships and and ship to the

United States or Europe or whatever it may be.

But if there is a worldwide slowdown because supply chains are damaged or interrupted, then you know we could have a serious recession

here in the United States and it could happen you know it could start in a few

months and if that happens and if particularly if it gets severe if it starts to get

almost like 2008 or a trigger something like 2008.

I think it's useful to take a look into the way back machine and see what has happened in the

past when there have been economic downturns.

Now obviously there is a lot of pain associated with an economic downturn and we don't

want to minimize that and nobody's wishing for an economic downturn because of the

pain that they caused. But there were a series of financial panics in the 1770s

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