The Coronavirus pandemic has created enormous volatility in global financial markets but prices of safe haven assets such as gold and bitcoin are not surging, as one might expect, thanks to intense and large-scale manipulation, according to analysis by the University of Sussex Business School. The contrast with the last major global financial catastrophe is telling. Following the Lehman Brothers collapse in September 2008, the correlations between the S&P 500 index and gold, or the Swiss Franc, or U.S. Treasuries were all around minus 40%. During March and April 2020 the correlation between the S&P 500 index and gold was plus 20%. The University of Sussex says that even more surprising is the behavior of the bitcoin/US dollar rate – since this cryptocurrency emerged in January 2009 its behavior was completely uncorrelated with any traditional asset, but as the S&P 500 index plummeted in early March 2020, so did bitcoin. Their correlation was plus 63% then, and it remains unsettlingly high at 40%. The biggest beneficiaries of these market attacks, beyond those placing the trades, are holders of US dollars and US assets. These become the main sources of positive returns for global investors in attempts to curtail the recent trend of some central banks to diversify their reserves away from the US dollar.