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.

Whilst it flew off before I could take a photo of it, I saw an owl in my gum tree in my backyard last night.

Cool. I have never seen an owl in the wild before – if you can call my backyard the wild.

Aside from my surprise owl visitor, I get bats and possums in my backyard at night, and rainbow lorikeets in the daytime hours.

Whilst I am well stocked for toilet paper, and have been for many years, I am troubled by the predicament that may be faced by some of my family and friends and colleagues, so I have been sharing from my stash in the past week.

I decided that, rather than hope that supermarkets replenish their stocks or alternatively to queue at all sorts of odd and counterproductive hours, it might be smart to find an alternative way to get a supply. Hence, on Thursday, I logged onto my Amazon account and for the first time ever (I have no love for Amazon) ordered something other than books, DVDs or CDs. I ordered a 32 roll pack of toilet paper. ETA is between 22 April, and 7 May. I can wait.

One of the possible outcomes from this pandemic and associated Toilet Paper Apocalypse is that people who prefer to shop for groceries in store start shifting in major numbers to online ordering and delivery.

It’s possible, but not certain. Coles and Woolworths, who have been building their online ordering businesses for quite some time, are not able to satisfy demand and I get the impression that people are losing confidence in this service from them. Amazon itself has so far underwhelmed in its grocery delivery business in Australia, but this does present an opportunity for them to get a foot in the door. After all, I would have ordered my toilet paper online from Coles or Woolworths if I had any confidence that it would arrive anytime soon.

More soberly, as of this moment, there have been 271,901 cases globally (there were 258,750 cases four hours ago), and 11304 deaths (an extra 28 since four hours ago). Parts of Italy where I spent several joyous days 6 months ago, such as Milan and the Veneto, have been devastated by the Grim Reaper. 47,021 cases in Italy so far. And we now have 854 in Australia.

This is not the end of the world. However, there will be major economic disruption and we are all worried, not so much for ourselves, but for those we care about.

It’s now about 11 days since I visited the supermarket and saw that it was almost completely out of toilet paper rolls.

Last night, there was no meat, and no bread. And there is very little pasta or pasta sauce left.

I think it is safe to say, as Dorothy did to Toto, that we are not in Kansas anymore.

This is the weirdest thing I have seen in my life, a shortage of so many things (albeit because the supply chains have not been set up to handle such demand). The closest to this that I would compare it to was the Longford gas explosion in 1998, where we were short of our gas supply for many weeks (I was in a flat then, and had electric hot water, so no cold showers for me thankfully).

This scarcity is all to do with public confidence. People are queuing up like they do in Communist countries and in wartime, because they are worried that they might not be able to get more later. It is a self perpetuating cycle, because when you see empty or near empty shelves, you feel the need to stock up more when you can, in case it is not there later, and that then leads to more empty shelves.

And there has been another series of falls on the sharemarket, although my ASX watch list yesterday did indicate major fluctuations in the shares I am monitoring – 10% fluctuations in the share prices across the trading day. This volatility is not normal. If I had decided to try to ride it out, instead of getting out of shares on the second dead cat bounce, I would be $67000 worse off right now.

Obviously, with an elderly mother, I have other things to worry about than share market matters in this pandemic. But the impact and disruption, on an economic scale, is going to be virtually unprecedented in the post 1945 world. The shutdowns, and the money printing by government and central banks to prevent people going to the wall, is likely to have a very serious medium term effect.

Right now, I am 95% of the way through Dorothy Must Die, the first of a series of dystopian novels about Oz, by Danielle Paige. In short, it imagines what if Dorothy and her trio of henchmen had turned to evil and tyrannised Oz, through the eyes of a modern day Kansas girl the tornado has dropped in Oz to take Dorothy down.

An intriguing premise indeed.

The Land of Oz has captured the imaginations of many creative people since L. Frank Baum wrote the first novel. We have had various movie interpretations (the 1970s Australian one, Oz, with bogan bikers instead of witches, is particularly bad, except for the climatic bit where Dorothy, nude except for her magic shoes, kicks the biker in the goolies instead of melting the witch with a bucket of water), musicals, cartoons, and novelisations.

In 2008, Sydney band Sneaky Sound System did a great song, Kansas City, which had a very Wizard of Oz film clip, starring their lead singer Miss Connie as Dorothy. Check it out sometime.

All this does get me thinking. In Australia, we rarely get so inspired by our own country and our cities to write songs or great novels about our home. Kansas is still an inspiration, as an example, even for us. Paul Kelly, with his song Leaps and Bounds, is one of the few people who seems to wax lyrical about Melbourne. Indie band Camp Cope is, with their song Footscray Station, one of the few recording groups or artists to feel inspired by my particular home town.

Whereas Americans seem to be enormously inspired by their cities. How many songs are about New York? Chicago? LA? Or even Tulsa, wherever that is.