How bad economically will the Covid19 virus crisis get? Martenson points out, “One in eight companies are so-called zombie companies.” Meaning, they have to keep borrowing cheap money to stay in business. Martenson says governments are hooked on huge deficits and cheap money too, and now the China virus chaos hits an already over-leveraged economy, and more massive money printing is needed to keep debt from defaulting. Martenson says, “This is taking the world’s most important manufacturing center and shutting it down all at once. That’s like throwing a car into reverse at 60 miles per hour on the highway. . . . Supply chain disruptions are going to be legendary. . . . This isn’t like one company having trouble like AIG where Hank Paulson has to ride to the rescue with $700 billion of fresh U.S. taxpayer money. We are talking about a system of tens of thousands of interlocking components that are frozen, and nobody quite knows how to unravel all of that. I think that is well beyond the capability of the Federal Reserve to throw more QE money into the market and goose stocks a little longer. This is the real deal. This isn’t a dress rehearsal. It is happening. People need to be able to make sense of this, and in the absence of being able to make sense of all of this, having some gold makes a lot of sense. I think that’s why we are seeing it pop here.”