“Many trees have fallen...and the electric lines are down. It is as if we had suffered an aerial attack or lost a battle. This is a terrible disaster. We’re hungry and cold.” This message comes from China, via the Daily Reckoning's Buenos Aires correspondent, Horacio Pozzo. He goes on to tell us: “China has suffered in the last few weeks, a severe crisis, with temperatures at their lowest levels in 50 years and record snowfalls. Energy shut-offs, water shortages, supplies of food running out, millions of people trapped, unable to produce or buy...creating an unimaginable paralysis...exposing to the world China’s extreme fragility... “Unshakable and powerful China has succumbed not to recession, nor to economic slowdown...but to Nature. Something much more powerful...and against which there is no Bernanke, no lower rates, no more liquidity, no Buffett, no credit insurance...nothing to save us.” China runs on coal. And coal runs on rail lines. And rail lines in China have been covered with snow and ice. When the coal stopped getting where it was supposed to go, practically the whole country came to a halt. Economic losses were on the order of $15 billion, with 350,000 houses destroyed and (according to the public reports) 100 people dead.