According to the new.com.au coronavirus tally open on my smart phone right now, there are 5,599 coronavirus cases in Australia, 311,544 in the USA, 126,168 in Spain, 124,632 in Italy, 96,092 in Germany, 90,848 in France, and 82,558 in China.

A few days ago, the number in China, according to that website, was 82301, and Wikipedia was reporting 81,554. Wikipedia is now reporting 81,669 cases in China.

On the other hand, Wikipedia’s numbers for the USA are 311,357, 126,168 for Spain, 124,632 for Italy, 96,108 for Germany, 89,953 for France, and of course, Australia is at 5,625.

Why are the figures for China lagging several days behind in accuracy compared to what is recorded for other countries in Wikipedia? I know that Wikipedia is not exactly a great source of truth, although it is a valuable resource, but in this case, I see more sinister agendas behind the obviously false number which is recorded for China, similar to the sinister agendas which have caused the world to believe that China has deliberately understated the number of cases by a factor of as much as forty.

I was watching a video presentation last night by a very pessimistic investment advisory service to which I subscribe.

They don’t exactly say to buy Gold, Guns, Toilet Paper, Tinned Food, and Banjos (well, they are pretty keen on Gold at least), but they did point out a few numbers which are a little more accurate than what I have been mentioning:

1. Between the Federal and State Governments of Australia, $330 Billion has been committed to addressing either the economic or medical aspects of the Coronavirus Pandemic
2. The US Government and Federal Reserve are going to be spending (or printing) $7 Trillion to address this same problem.

That’s so far.

A very old friend of mine this morning texted me the link to some other video on You Tube which has some chap decoding Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke’s monetary policies in terms of Keynesianism (with an Austrian critique), and talking about the wisdom of buying – you guessed it – Gold.

Richard Nixon, who put the Gold Standard ultimately to rest about 50 years ago, is famous for saying (aside from ‘I am not a crook’) ‘We are all Keynesians now’.

That is the sticking point, as Lady Macbeth might say. It is always a little bewildering, given that I am a believer in free market economics (albeit one whose only economic education is the self education that comes from reading Ludwig Von Mises, John Kenneth Galbraith, Milton Friedman, Von Hayek, two or three random introductory economics texts, and the Freakonomics books), when I see governments which are led by political parties who espouse free market economics most of the time, then turning to Keynesianism.

J.M. Keynes was a complex thinker and individual. It would be an injustice to that very clever man to simplify his ideas, but that is what politicians of all colours do. Their interpretation of his ideas is that the way to solve any problem is for government to SPEND SPEND SPEND. If that does not worth, then SPEND SPEND SPEND MORE.

To do this, governments borrow, or they raise taxes, or both. Borrowing is a form of money printing. It will cause inflation. This is not always obvious to the average mug punter in the street.

In the past twenty years, consumer staples, which are what inflation is measured against, has been extremely low. You can get a loaf of bread for under $3, or a litre of milk for under $2. Compare that to 1976, when a litre of milk cost 40 cents. However, where the inflation has been manifest is in house prices and in the share market – that is, assets rather than consumables are where the inflation occurs. My family home growing up, which cost my parents just under $30,000 in 1976, now is probably worth $900,000, thirty times what it cost 44 years ago. Imagine if milk now cost $12 per litre. You would notice that.

However, when you go to buy a house, as whilst not a consumable, a roof over your head is one of those intrinsic things that you probably need, given that it is either 6000 years since we left the Garden of Eden (if you are a creationist) or about 5000 years since most of our ancestors ceased to be nomadic hunter-gatherers, you will notice that hidden inflation.

Explaining these stark realities to people is hard, and complicated. Politicians of all colours, and most of the media, see this as too hard. Spending, which shows immediate action and immediate gratification (which our minds are hard wired towards favouring over long term rewards), is far easier to do and to announce. This is why Keynesianism always trumps (sic) Austrian economics in terms of fiscal and monetary policy.

Those videos I was watching today and yesterday suggest that the Elites are going to benefit from this, as if this is a conspiracy to inflate assets with governmental largesse for their benefit. I do not believe that this is a conspiracy of the Elites. I think it is simply human behaviour. Our politicians are human, and whilst most of them are probably smarter and better educated and informed than the average person in the street, they are not philosopher-kings. They are there to give the people what they think the people want, in order to keep the people voting for them.

It was thus in Ancient Greece and in the Roman Republic, and it is thus now. The hoi-poloi will be kept happy for today with bread and circuses (as Juvenal put it), and will worry less about tomorrow, when taxes rise and real assets (like homes) become increasingly hard to attain.

The share market’s ups and downs fascinate me, and have ever since I got my first minuscule parcel of Mayne Nickless shares almost 24 years ago.

Staying out of the market bugs me a lot – it is like not having any red wine in the house, a state of affairs which is quite askew.

So this morning, amidst all the volatility, I placed a low ball offer on 500 shares in Washington Soul H Pattison (SOL), a company in which I have on-off been a share holder most of the past 6 years. The share price rose to around $18 in early trading, and then sank to about $16.86. My low ball offer was $16.90, so I was able to get back in at about 3.40pm.

The fluctuation was about 5.5% in price across the entire day.

What does that mean going forward? On Monday, I intend to place a medium ball sell order and see what happens. I am still carrying some capital losses from about six years ago which I have not been able to offset (even with my recent bailing out of the market), so if I can make some capital gains and square the ledger a little, that will be good.

Otherwise, Washington Soul H Pattison remains one of those companies I intend to hold in my long term share portfolio when the madness ends, so I have no problem with continuing to own them.

In any event, investing relatively small amounts in the share market right now is the kind of retail therapy which may prevent me from making a big mistake and throwing everything I have right back into the market prematurely!

I have an olive tree in my front garden. It was a housewarming gift 17 years ago from my then boss.

Most years, I get some olives. Last year, they were very puny in size. This year, I just had a look at the ripening fruit and as you can see from the photo, there are some lush fat olives on the tree, and I will have a fine harvest worth pickling around Anzac Day.

I suppose the reasons for the larger fruits this year (if you can call something so bitter a fruit) are that it has rained a whole lot over what, bushfires aside, was a pretty mild summer, and that I aggressively pruned the tree last winter.

Of course, there are many olive trees in my suburb. People grow them on their nature strips. I think my olive tree is not going to produce enough fruit for me. I will map out where all the olive trees are in my immediate proximity and then, when it gets close to the time for picking them, I should dress in dark clothing like a ninja and go around after dark picking a few olives from each of them….

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.