Former National Economic Council and chief economic advisor to President Donald Trump Gary Cohn talked the hit the global stock markets are taking while the coronavirus spreads in an interview with CNN's Anderson Cooper.
GARY COHN, FMR. TRUMP ECONOMIC ADVISOR: This is not 2008. 2008 was a completely different scenario. This is a scenario where the consumers have withdrawn from the market. Consumers aren't spending money. Companies cannot sell products. And, in many respects, there's no ability to sell products. And what is a's happening, and this is the tragedy of this, is you've got many workers in the economy today who actually want to go to work. There's no place for them to go to work...
2008 was a different scenario. 2008, the economy was growing. People were borrowing a lot of money. The entire system was getting highly, highly levered. The banked were dramatically, dramatically levered. So we walked into this public health crisis three, four weeks ago, with our banks if phenomenally good situation. And you saw that. The CEOs at the White House yesterday said, look, the banks are in good position. The banks continue to lend money...
We have repriced the stock market. But it's not a financial crisis. We're reacting to the fact that we no longer can figure out what companies are going to earn for the relative short period of time, medium period of time. And the market's repricing that. And that's natural behavior of markets. Markets hate uncertainty. Markets love predictability.
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