I have two sources I read regularly about the pandemic. One is the news.com.au website and the other is the wikipedia page on the corona virus pandemic.

I have noticed an interesting discrepancy.

As of a minute or so ago, the News site says that there are 189,633 cases in the USA, and 4,864 cases in Australia, and 82,301 cases in Communist China.

On the Wikipedia page, it says that there are 189,445 cases in the USA, 4,862 in Australia, and 81,554 cases in Communist China.

What I have noticed is that, for several days, the number of cases on the Wikipedia page for China has hardly moved. The difference between News.com.au and Wikipedia for the USA is 0.099%, for Australia it is 0.04%. For China, the difference is 0.92% – that is the Wikipedia figures for Communist China are 9 times more inaccurate (or out of date) compared to those for the USA, and about 23 times more inaccurate than those for Australia.

This causes me to doubt the reliability of what Wikipedia is reporting in terms of the corona virus figures for China, and ask myself as to who is updating those figures and what their agenda is? If we were to talk about fake news, here is an example.

It occurred to me around 4pm, when I was writing my duty manager’s report for the day (I am mostly working from home, but being in the office on Wednesdays and Thursdays to cover any spot fires which might come up), that it was April 1st, and that I had not seen any April fools jokes in the media.

I suppose that what is happening at the moment is far too serious for that sort of jocularity. Too many people either dying or at risk of dying. Or at the very best, too many people losing their livelihoods.

But aside from the constant news feed on corona virus, there seems to be one thing in the local news feed, and that is the appalling train wreck reality TV which is Married at First Sight.

MAFS as it is commonly known, is the sort of trash TV which does not exactly feature people sincere about being paired up with a stranger who may turn out to be their soulmate. It is about recruiting some very narcissistic, promiscuous and highly telegenic people of either sex who are probably single for the simple reason that they have short attention spans about anything which does not involve their own self-absorption or prospects for a career of idleness as a social media influencer. (I do hope that I don’t sound too sanctimonious when I say that.)

I do not watch much TV, and I have never watched MAFS. But I do find it amusing to read the summaries each day, with the latest ‘cheating scandal’ to shock and amuse.

Perhaps, in lieu of April fools’ Day jokes this year, we have Married At First Sight.

I knew a chap at uni who later went on to become a financial journalist. We did not exactly get along well. Probably at least partly, if not mostly, my fault. But not entirely.

When he got his own byline in the business pages of one or other of the Fairfax papers, I remember reading a brief article by him which said something really informative and value adding along the lines of ‘financial markets were very bullish yesterday‘. It was so long ago that it was before I knew what ‘bullish’ meant in that context. I could imagine him in his nasally tone saying out that loud whilst squinting with his beady eyes. (Yes, I am sometimes a mean person.)

But right now, when the stock market is going up and down like a yo-yo, you have to wonder what all the financial journalists and analysts are really saying, and what they mean, and whether you can really make informed decisions based on what they write.

I have been paying fairly close attention to the Bloomberg app in particular the past five weeks, and the headline story on the app right now is ‘Jim Rogers Expects “Worst Bear Market in My Lifetime” in Coming Years’. The dot points under that say that another rout is ‘imminent’ because of economic damage and high debt, and that this Rogers chap (I have never heard of him before) has lots of cash and has bought shares in China and Russia.

What it says in the article I do not know – I have used up my free articles for this month and don’t want to pay for reading more.

Last night, the big story on the Bloomberg app was that analysts in JP Morgan thought that the worst of the bear market was over. I tempered the FOMO that triggered in me by reading something in the ABC website (ie the Australian Broadcasting Corporation) calling the recent rise in share prices a ‘classic bear trap’.

Which leaves you wondering what to believe. Is the worst over, or are we still very early in a lengthy bear market. You can easily find someone to give you either answer.

Perhaps, the most accurate answer, to quote the early 1990s band Frente! (I do have quaint taste in music) is Yes, No, Maybe.

A friend of mine put it best when we were chatting about stocks and the market today when he said that ‘if financial journalists were so bright, why were they hammering away on a keyboard instead of living in the Bahamas with their feet in a bucket of champagne’?

Exactly. And I have only heard of two financial journalists who seem to have gotten on in business – one is Heather Killen (daughter of Sir Jim) and the other is the late Christopher Skase. Ms Killen seems to have done alright, in a low key fashion. Mr Skase on the other hand, earned a very sympathetic obituary from his former colleagues at the Financial Review, who claimed, very charitably, that his ventures had not actually hurt any real people, and that Palm Cove had been a great development which had added benefit to the tourism industry.

The first company I ever bought shares in, some 24 years ago, was Mayne Nickless, who were in the process of divesting themselves of their quarter of Optus. As a newcomer to share investing, I bought $1000 worth of shares in Mayne and followed them avidly, the way that a new convert to AFL follows his new team.

I suddenly started reading the Financial Review several times a week and buying each month one or other of the print sharemarket magazines that had then become popular (remember, this was 5 years after the Commonwealth Bank float and the year before Telstra 1, so every man and his dog suddenly owned shares).

I remember one magazine having, in the one issue, a technical analysis which was pessimistic about Mayne Nickless long term, and, separately, a write up which was very ‘bullish’ about Mayne. In other words, contradictory accounts in the one magazine.

It reminds me of an edition of Nexus Magazine (my favourite conspiracy theory rag) from around that time. In that issue, it ran a story which conclusively proved the moon landings were fake, and on the following page another article which proved just as convincingly that we did land on the moon, but we were warned by the UFOs waiting there not to return.

Much as I prefer to believe that the coronavirus pandemic is not cause for concern, things are getting weirder and weirder. Whilst we are not now in lockdown per se, we are not meant to leave our homes except to go to work/study, the doctor, the supermarket, or exercise.

Work has made this a bit easier – much as I am reluctant to work from home rather than the habit of my adult life of going to the office, tonight I was obliged to take my laptop home and will be spending at least three days per week working from home. This is probably for the best, as whilst public transport is almost entirely deserted, I suspect that the risk of catching something is greater when on the way to and from the office.

But all this adds to the surreality of what is going on. Most shops are closed, cafes and restaurants are more likely to close for the duration, and people are in their homes rather than out on the streets or going about their usual daily business. How long will this last?

The latest relief package from the federal government (I do keep careful count of these, and the cost is now over $300 billion) supposedly caused the share market to go up by some ‘record’ amount this afternoon. What happens on a day when there is no new relief package announced? And I heard about the relief package whilst grabbing my bus this morning at 7.20am, long before the ASX opened. The share market was all over the place, including down, for much of the day.

More soberly, over 723,000 infections so far, and now over 34,000 deaths. Luckily, the respective numbers in Australia are just over 4000 and under 20. We probably are doing something right to contain it here, and our healthcare system is of better quality than elsewhere, but that just goes to show how lucky we are to live here.

It’s a bit amusing to read that people are not happy about bring quarantined in five star hotels. Free of charge. It might be a lot boring, but it’s better than where I usually stay when travelling.

I do hope they have plenty of books to read – I always carry a stash of books when I travel.

https://www.news.com.au/lifestyle/health/health-problems/coronavirus-arrivals-to-australia-complain-about-quarantine-in-hotels/news-story/bff5101eba3cf0adc3c36df8dcd4048e

It was through Nevil Shute borrowing the name for his 1950s post-apocalyptic novel On The Beach (which was almost immediately filmed with Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner and Fred Astaire) from a passage in the poem The Hollow Men that I first discovered T.S. Eliot when I was 15:

In this last of meeting places

We grope together

And avoid speech

Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Few people know that part of the poem. More will remember the ending:

This is the way the world ends

Not with a bang but a whimper

That’s a famous and often misquoted closing line (although I might be wrong there – Eliot did use to borrow a lot from others, so perhaps the phrase ‘with a whimper not a bang’ or some such, came from some other origin).

On The Beach, which is a rarely seen film these days (I have only seen the remake with Bryan Brown, which is god-awful), is mostly remembered in Melbourne these days for it’s leading lady Ava Gardner being quoted (possibly inaccurately or out of context) as saying that Melbourne is the perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world.

And apparently the end of the film was an extremely sobering warning during the Cold War, with the usually full streets of central Melbourne totally deserted (everyone having killed themselves to avoid dying slowly of radiation poisoning).

This week, given that I am required to be at work, I have wandered the empty streets of Melbourne at lunchtimes and pondered that movie (and of course, the novel, which I have read several times). Hardly anyone is out. On the way home tonight, I stopped at Highpoint around 4pm to check in at the supermarket (toilet paper was available, so I bought another pack just in case). and the shops were mostly closed or empty. Highpoint is usually bursting with people til about 9pm on a Friday night, so seeing what it usually looks like at 8am on a Sunday is quite disturbing.

This is a very strange time in history. Probably the first time since 1945 that the First World has had to face a serious challenge head on. I have made it clear in past postings that I am skeptical of apocalyptic thinking. Coronavirus is, as commentators like to say, novel, and that is what is the source of all the fear and apprehension. But is it worse than flu or measles, diseases which are themselves potentially quite lethal but which we do mostly shrug off as routine?

Hopefully the measures which are being taken to slow down the pandemic work, and things can start getting back to some semblance of normality soon. However, I think that the road to economic recovery is going to be a rather slow one.

On the weekend, I did some sums. I added up all of the Federal Government’s current and promised commitments to keep the economy going and to relieve the suffering of the un and under employed during the current crisis, and then divided it by the population of Australia.

It comes to about $7500 which is going to be spent on average for every person, adult or child, in this country.

That is a lot of money, and we are in the situation where much more is going to be needed after the crisis passes, as right now, businesses are shutting and the only stable employment is in the medical profession or a supermarket. People are not going to be out there spending their cash in restaurants, or bars, or clothing boutiques, or dog grooming businesses.

They are going to be stocking up on tins, toilet paper, hand sanitisers, and other bunkering down type commodities. The velocity of money is going to really slow down. To speed up it again, after this blasted pandemic has lifted, will require more government spending, probably in the form of a large cash gift to every person to go out there and splash cash around, just like Rudd and Swan did during the GFC.

In the meantime, who is going to pay for all this? We are, eventually. Money spent on trying to keep the country going in this way is going to require either larger debt, which will lead to inflation, or larger taxes, or cuts to government services. This time, it might be worth it. Last time, when Rudd proudly claimed to be a Keynesian, creating lots of jobs for Irish backpackers to install insulation bats and solar panels and to build unnecessary second school halls on school ovals, it was not worth it.

I have always considered myself, ever since I replaced my innate conservatism with more well reasoned libertarian views, a supporter of economic rationalism.

I still do, for the most part, as it is both the most morally appropriate and effective model for economic thinking.

But, as I get older, I see it simply as a theoretical model. I have seen enough of human behaviour in my adult life to know that we do not always behave rationally, or in our best interests. We tend more often than not to be influenced by our emotions.

Take last night on Wall Street for example. There was an 11% surge on the Dow Jones, the largest one day gain since 1933. And this happened, despite a 30% jump in Corona Virus cases in 24 hours, and the postponement of the Tokyo Olympics, merely on the PROMISE of a large economic stimulus being passed by the US Congress.

Does that strike you as rational behaviour? Or is it a sign of the psychology of crowds, or herd behaviour, or mass hysteria? Proof, perhaps, that the share market is driven by the twin emotions of fear and greed (ie fear of missing out)?

I am not an expert in Austrian Economics, but, having read Ludwig Von Mises’ magnum opus Human Action once, I believe that he, of all free market economists, got it closest to right. That is, that humans and their behaviour and motives are too complex to be distilled down easily into a theory which can predict behaviour on the basis of a simplistic model assuming 100% rational self-interest.

Let’s put this in a way that most people can understand (and please remember that I much prefer Star Wars to Star Trek). Consider Mr Spock and Captain Kirk. Spock, the half-Vulcan, tries to remain logical at all times, and perhaps best symbolises rationalism. To us mere humans, Spock seems awfully repressed. Then you have Kirk, who is emotional, intuitive, and empathetic. He is smart, but he trusts his hunches, often going forward without a full set of facts. And he is usually right (well, this is Science Fiction after all!). Kirk, the less than logical and rational human, best represents us and how we behave.

That is, we hope to get it right, but we go on our hunches and our feelings, because we want to feel right at that particular moment.

Putting it in personal terms right now, whilst I have the proceeds from selling my share portfolio parked in the bank earning very little interest and at risk of being eroded by high digit inflation from the current round of money printing, I am finding it hard to control the urge to get back into the share market whilst it is all still so cheap.

What causes me to over rule my FOMO is that I am a student of history. I had just enough skin in the game during the GFC to have learned from it, and I know from having read enough about the Great Depression to know that the bear market on Wall Street lasted until 1939. A big bounce in 1933 was not going to make any share investors any richer. It just was a sign that things were going to stay really bad, for a really long time.

At one point today, the losses which I avoided by bailing out of the share market 20 days ago were up to $90,000. Right now, they only stand at $85,000. In other words, the one decision to get out of the share market has saved me more losses than I have made from a series of truly awful investment decisions at various times since the GFC (some in the share market, some in other more speculative investment prospects which went south).

Some of the few people who have known me so long would recall that I used to have an intellectual indulgence (or pretension, more accurately) about 30 years or so ago for quoting T.S. Eliot. I think today, Chapter IV of The Waste Land is very apt:

Phlebas the Phoenician, a fortnight dead,

Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell

And the profit and the loss.

A current under sea

Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell

He passed the stages of his age and youth

Entering the whirlpool.

Gentile or Jew

O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,

Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

Today is very much a day, as Coronavirus takes a grip on the world, for forgetting profit and loss, but particularly profit. It is also not a time for looking to windward, where the financial storm is raging so fiercely, but for looking to leeward, where there may be a safe harbour (if anything is actually safe right now).

I think I have waxed poetic and intellectually self-indulgent enough for one afternoon. I should either nap now or do another round trip to the supermarket to stock up further on tinned food and long life milk.

I am not exactly enamoured of Frequent Flyer programs. The collapse of Ansett Airlines in mid 2001 cost me almost 60,000 points, which had been earned mostly through spending on my linked credit card. Ever since then, I have made sure to cash out my credit card reward points regularly, originally as gift cards, but most recently on a monthly basis as cash back.

The only reason I have Qantas and Virgin Frequent Flyer memberships is in the unlikely event that my occasional overseas trip might result in some points which I could then redeem onshore for a domestic holiday.

I learned about 3 years ago that redeeming points for flights with Virgin was a near futile exercise, and I learned on my return from Italy 5 months ago that whilst it is possible to earn Qantas points when travelling with airline partners, this was not the case in relation to my particular trip.

But whilst highly displeased with both programs, I see no reason to cancel my memberships.

What does bemuse me this week is the sheer volume of tone-deaf emails from Qantas Frequent Flyer offering various points or bonus points. 10 emails in the past week.

This is at a time when their much unloved CEO is, in response to the Coronavirus pandemic, standing down 20,000 staff, slashing domestic flights, and closing down the international part of the operation (I do not hear him announcing that he will take a pay cut so he can share the pain of the Qantas staff he suggests are suitable for stacking shelves at Coles or Woolworths during the crisis).

I find myself asking, what is the point of all these emails inviting me to boost my points via one deal or another, when non-essential domestic travel is being discouraged and international travel is nigh on impossible?

It is an exercise in futility, it really is.