Join us in New York on November 29th for the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference,

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2023 marks the 11 year anniversary of our Canada focused event and continues the tradition of providing timely

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officials from Saskatchewan, Quebec, British Columbia, Alberta and Ontario as well

as speakers from Northland Power, World Bank, Transolta, and many more.

Register at Bloomberg Live.com slash Canadian Finance slash radio. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast.

I'm Tracy Allaway.

My co-host Joe Weisenthal is away this week.

So, the entire world has been watching the outbreak of a deadly new coronavirus and I have to say I'm

recording this podcast from my apartment in Hong Kong and a lot of workers in the

city have now been asked to work from home and as I'm recording there's

this huge thunderstorm outside so apologies if you hear in the background but I got to say

the entire atmosphere of Hong Kong at the moment feels kind of apocalyptic.

This morning China just reported an extra 15,000 coronavirus cases after changing its methodology for diagnosis, and that

takes the total cases to more than 50,000 in Hubay province alone, the

epicenter of the outbreak. Deaths are now well over a thousand people, that's

according to official numbers, and of course there's a lot of doubt surrounding

those official numbers, and in between sort of obsessively checking my temperature all week and trying to find masks in Hong Kong, most of them are sold out.

There's another thing that I've been obsessing over and that is the World Bank's catastrophe bonds.

Now these aren't just any catastrophe bonds.

Cat bonds are typically linked to things like hurricanes and earthquakes and

...