Investing

What happened?
• Global share markets have fallen in recent days driven by a collapsed oil deal and coronavirus impacts.
• The Australian share market fell 19.6% from its peak on 20 February 2020 to 9 March.
• This means the gains of 2019 have been lost with the index back at Dec-18 levels.

From late December 2019 a new virus outbreak, officially called Covid-19 (a.k.a. “coronavirus”), emerged out of Wuhan, China. To date this outbreak was focused on China which accounted for 96.7% of 80,423
confirmed cases and 98.4% of 2,708 reported deaths (as at February 26).
However, in recent weeks we have seen notable growth in cases particularly in South Korea
and Italy as well as Japan, Iran and elsewhere in Europe.