Will the coronavirus lead to the Great Sino-American De-coupling?

A FEW months before the 2008 financial crisis, renowned financial adviser Nassim Taleb published The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The book became an international sensation after a highly improbable event happened. And that was the financial crisis which led the collapse of some of the major global financial intuitions.

Mr Taleb employed the term "black swan" to describe high-profile, hard-to-predict, and rare events. These are outliers that are beyond the realm of normal expectations in history, science, finance and technology. They come out of the blue, and end up having huge and transformative consequences.

Which begs the question: Should we describe the Covid-19 outbreak as a case of a black swan? After all, no one had expected it or predicted that it would happen, coming as it did out the blue.