When the Australian Stock Exchange closed this afternoon, it was officially down 20% from the record high in February. A 20% decline from a peak is officially regarded as a bear market.

How long will this last? I think the distance in the GFC from peak to bottom was about 16 months – November 2007 til March 2009.

I plan to measure it according to my toilet paper supply. I did an inventory the other day and found that I currently own 85 rolls of toilet paper – the result of steady purchasing and hoarding over the better part of a decade, along with the quaint habit of collecting rolls from hotel rooms, along with the other toiletries. As it is estimated that a person goes through 2 rolls of toilet paper per week, I will be able to last 42 1/2 weeks til my supply of toilet paper runs out. That’s almost 10 months til I will need to buy anymore.

And I am able to improvise. I have paper towels and tissues in abundant supply as well. On top of this, I spend much of my time at work, or at large shopping centres, where the toilet paper is provided for you.

Given that bear markets last on average 14 months, I think that my toilet paper stash will end before the bear market does.

And perhaps that should be when I start investing in the share market again – when my current supply of toilet paper ends, I need to start putting my hard earned cash gradually back into shares (or, in my case, Exchange Traded Funds and Listed Investment Companies).

My share portfolio took a big hit a couple of weeks ago, but nothing compared to what I would have lost if I had not headed for the exit last Tuesday. According to the watch list which I just recreated on my newly reinstalled Bloomberg app on my iPhone, I am now $25,000 better off for having gotten out of the market then, than I would be if I had stayed in today.

Labour Day public holidays are usually slow days for the sharemarket, given that in one guise or another, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT are all on holiday today. But money never sleeps, as Gordon Gecko might say, and the fear which caused a sharp fall on Wall Street on Friday has now firmly gripped the Australian Securities Exchange (to give it its proper name).

Usually, when there is a fall, it happens at opening, and that more or less sets the level for the entire day. Today is different. The sharp fall at opening has been compounded as people get more and more alarmed, and subsequently start panic selling. The ASX 200 is now down almost 6.5% since opening.

If I had stayed in the market, I would be unable to bring myself to watch the carnage, but because I sold out and no longer have skin in the game, I am finding today fascinating.

As I have posted previously, I had no understanding of the stock market in 1987, being a mere 18 year old university student who had very little money and no financial nous beyond knowing that term deposits paid more interest than bank book accounts. The Asian crisis in late 1997 had little impact on me either, as I was buying my 600 shares in the first Telstra float, which was only the second shareholding I ever owned, and I still had a small amount outstanding on the mortgage on my first home. Similarly, when the Dotcom crash happened in early 2000, I had little active interest – whilst I had been growing my modest share portfolio (I got 400 shares in Telstra 2, and do you remember the shareholder discount card you got with your minimum 500 Coles Myer shares?), it was not exactly a big deal. And whilst the GFC in 2008 did hurt, how much hurt can it do you when you are mostly focused on paying off the last portion of your loan and your share portfolio is only $80G? Before I headed for the exit last week, my portfolio had grown to four times that!

So, for the first time ever, I am seriously cashed up at the time of a share market crash, and in the fortunate position of having decided to get out of the market before things turned really ugly. Now I will sit, and watch with great fascination, and wait.

How long will the bear market last, and where will it bottom out? One sharemarket e-letter I read has got a doomsayer who claims share prices are as inflated as they were in 1929, and that a crash could wipe 65% of the wealth from the market. Another chap is predicting a major readjustment of the global financial system, which will involve considerable pain for normal people (the Cyprus crisis of several years ago where bank accounts were frozen is cited as a forerunner of what is to come, except on a global scale).

As I have indicated before, I consider that all the paranoia about the Coronavirus stems from the hard wiring we have from the 1600 plus years of eschatological conditioning from the time when Christianity become compulsory in the Roman Empire.

However, I cannot help but notice the effect on my share portfolio. Is someone who remains in the market now and tries to ride it out brave or foolish? I am neither – another part of my hard wiring, as is written in my description, is that I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. There is nothing in there which makes me a particularly reckless stock trader or financial hotshot.

So, when what I strongly suspected to be a dead cat bounce occurred on Tuesday, I pushed the SELL button on my entire portfolio. [Well, that is not entirely true. About 10 years ago, I bought 2 slabs of Broo beer when they did a share giveaway, and as a result, I still hold 100 shares of Broo, which were worth about 1.2 cents each on Tuesday.]

I could say that I am taking one for the team, for the greater good of Humanity. You see, when I buy usually turns out to be a good time to sell, and vice versa. So, if it turns out that I am wrong, then Coronavirus goes away, and the world economy and markets recover quickly.

If I am right, at least I will not have lost the accumulated savings of the past decade in an awful sharemarket bloodbath.

Things are starting to get a little surreal though. I passed through two supermarkets this evening, and ALL the toilet paper, paper towels, tissues and anything else could be used as a toilet paper substitute was sold out. [As I have indicated in an earlier post, I have kept a six month supply of toilet paper since the days of the Gillard Government.] Now even Bibles seem to be selling out, from what I also observed.

We are conditioned to think eschatologically, even though most of us struggle to understand what that means. Instinctively, like a herd, we are all cautiously heading for the fire exits, so to speak, grabbing sacks of rice, jumbo packs of toilet paper, and a plethora (I hardly ever use that silly word anymore) of other things which might come in handy if we are forced into isolation in our homes for a few weeks.

And that is why I feel very comfortable with having liquidated my share portfolio. I get the feeling that the fear out there is going to get much worse, and that this is going to cause major economic disruption. Exactly one month ago, when I started taking screenshots of the Coronavirus tallies, there were 28,262 infected, 565 dead, and 14 in Australia. As of right now the tally is 98370 cases, 3383 dead, and 63 in Australia, with some schools, shops and offices now closing where the occupants have come into contact with known cases. 2700 people in Queensland have been asked to self-isolate.

• 

The above photo was taken a couple of hours ago at my local bookshop at Highpoint Shopping Centre. This section is the Spirituality section where you buy the Bibles. As you can see, the shelves here are almost empty.

It appears that the threat of Coronavirus has now caused people to move on from panic buying toilet paper to panic buying Bibles too.

Time to emulate Hunter S. Thompson, grab a bottle of wine and my copy of the KJV, and start reading the Book of Revelation.

As you might guess from some of what I occasionally post on this blog, I am a bit of a Shakespeare fan. And I am both fascinated by and appalled by the theories that the plays were not written by Shakespeare.

Ben Elton, in writing a recently broadcast episode of Upstart Crow (a sitcom about Shakespeare), has dealt with the authorship theories very effectively. He has an episode where Shakespeare’s nemesis Robert Greene plots, along with Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, to murder Kit Marlowe, as the first step in creating doubt about the authorship. His cunning plan is that future generations are to believe that Marlowe has faked his death, and in fact is hiding out and writing the plays for Shakespeare. He also assigns roles to Bacon and Oxford, so that they too are to become candidates for authorship.

It is a just too funny episode, in a series which gets better with each passing season.

In passing, I will mention that some of the early advocates for the alternative authorship theories include Delia Bacon, who lived out her life in an insane asylum, and a chap unfortunately named Looney.

Just got back from my local Coles, and yes, the Coronavirus panic buying is real. Most tinned food, hand sanitiser, pasta, and toilet paper (except for the brands reputed to be as soft as sandpaper) have sold out. I have not seen anything like it.

I don’t need to panic buy stuff. Ever since the Venezuelan toilet paper crisis a decade ago, during the prime ministership of Julia Gillard, I have kept a stockpile of sufficient toilet paper to last me six months or more. [My reasoning at the time was that if a communist government in Venezuela could cause the country to run out of toilet paper, I could not push my luck too hard on the authenticity of Julia Gillard’s abandonment of Marxist principles.]

All the same, whilst I was mostly there to buy some mineral water, I decided to stock up a bit on tins and pasta, just in case. The idea of holing up for a few weeks at home, binge watching Netflix and eating pasta and tins of beetroot (assuming that Uber Eats and Deliveroo are not operating in that period) does not hold any major dread for me.

The Vienna based (but American) fantasy novelist, Jonathan Carroll, once wrote a wickedly black short story ‘The Jane Fonda Room’, in which damned person gets to choose their own unique version of Hell, and the protagonist of the story chooses The Jane Fonda Room, where he will watch all her films over and over again for Eternity. Here’s the ending:

She looked at him and her face was happy and animated again. “You’re just in time for the beginning of The Chase. Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. Not a bad cast, eh? Then comes Barbarella, Klute, Coming Home, Nine to Five. What about that? Pretty good for your first time around!”

“And after that?” Paul’s eyes narrowed because it had finally began to dawn on him what was about to happen.

Ms Baker frowned for the first time. “After that? You see all of the other movies she made. However many that is. Isn’t that wonderful? What more could you ask – “

“Again and again?” His fingers were now very cold.

“You -“

“Without stop? All of Jane Fonda’s movies again and again and again without stop?’

Ms Baker signed and looked a little bored. “Yes, Paul, again and again. Again and again and again and again and again and again…” While she spoke she pointed to the door and it opened.

The first thing Paul saw in the middle of that darkness was the familiar face which he, at one time, would have died for.

Quite wickedly funny. Please don’t let me spoiling that five page short story turn you away from Jonathan Carroll’s novels. The Land of Laughs and Outside the Dog Museum are both classics, and I really think it is way too long since I read either of those.

Perhaps this is the sort of idea the people running Guantanamo Bay had when they had all those suspected terrorists there, and regaled them with the music of Britney Spears over and over again. Jonathan Carroll’s Hell is not too different from Sartre’s definition of Hell, when you think about it.

Which is a nice way of segueing into Falco, mid 1980s Vienna based euro-pop singer. Every few days, since the start of this year, I have tried to do some exercise, as I am about 12-13 kilos overweight and my eating and drinking habits do not really lend themselves to easy weight loss. I mostly do sit ups, although I every now and then try some push ups and have now started ‘planking’.

To make the exercise ordeal a little less painful, I open up the Apple Music and put some tunes on. Tonight, to inspire me to try and set a new record number of sit ups in a row (sit ups are easy, you can do as many as you like til you die of boredom), I perversely chose to listen to a collection of Falco’s greatest hits.

This consists essentially of one song, Rock Me Amadeus, played over and over again. By my count, there are ten different versions of this song available which I have heard this evening. There are a few other sounds to break up the monotony – but of them I am only vaguely familiar with Der Kommissar, which has only four different versions available (what on Earth is a ‘Pastel Remix’????). The rest of his body of work is a hitherto undiscovered country to me, and probably shall remain so, as I think I will choose something else for my next workout.

I am not sure that Rock Me Amadeus is the sort of song which one wants to hear over and over and over again. I think I was about 16 when it came out, some 35 years ago, which makes it further back in time from us now, than Rock Around The Clock was from us in 1985. And even then, it was one of those songs you might want to hear occasionally, but not all the time.

Ouch ouch ouch!

Last Friday afternoon, I really should have pressed the sell button on my share portfolio.

After one week (so far) of blood letting in the share market, I am down over $30G!

It looks like Coronavirus is the black swan event which we all expected but which none of us were prepared to anticipate.

Now, we can watch and learn an object lesson in what really motivates the share market, as we watch the falls continuing.

There are two motive forces driving the share market. One is Greed, which pushes it up, and the other is Fear. Or, if you are to look more closely at Greed, and define it in the way which millennials would describe it, as the Fear Of Missing Out, there is only Fear.

And now Coronavirus driven Fear, based on the great reliance on China as a key component of the global economy, is causing the markets to fall.

Having resisted the temptation to push the sell button a week ago, I am now left with little choice but to ride out this market fall to the bottom, whenever and wherever that happens to be. This will be an ‘interesting’ experience for me. I knew nothing about shares when the 1987 crash happened, had only a negligible share portfolio in the late 1990s when the Asian financial crisis happened and then tech wreck around Easter 2000, and only about a third of what I currently have invested when GFC hit 12 years ago.

With Coronavirus in the mix, this does remind me very much of Edgar Alan Poe’s Masque of the Red Death – you can ignore the reality around you for as long as you can, and continue to party hard, right up until the Grim Reaper’s representative shows up on the dance floor….

In the past week, the Fairfax press has revealed that Australian swimming champion Mack Horton was apparently going to have a swimming pool named after him at his old school, Caulfield Grammar, but that this plan was quietly shelved due to his public criticism of convicted drug cheat Sun Yang, in order to protect the school’s commercial interests.

One of the stories is here:

https://www.smh.com.au/national/school-refloats-horton-pool-plan-after-backlash-at-china-cowardice-20200224-p543wf.html

Many people have already criticised the school for this cowardice, such that even though the school claims that there were no such abandoned plans, it is now actively considering repairing its damage by actually doing what was rumoured and honouring Mack Horton in this way.

It would be apt to do so. Mack Horton is an Olympic gold medalist, something which, in our wealthy and sporting mad nation, makes him a great hero in itself (I say that with a bit of irony – when I commented on a reigning Brownlow medalist being a hero at age 12, a teacher archly observed what about heart surgeons and others who save lives). But that he has been outspoken in his disdain and lack of tolerance for known and blatant cheating in his sport does elevate Mack Horton above other Australian swimmers, as he appears to represent an ideal of fair play which is increasingly disregarded and sidelined in modern sport in place of the expedience of winning.

The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar is a case in point. The accusation is that they were so afraid of offending the government of Communist China, which allows many fee paying students to come to Australia and attend that school, that they were unwilling to honour one of their visibly successful old boys, who not only has succeeded as a swimmer, but who embodies fair play. Commercial interests are far more important, supposedly, than fair play,

What message is Caulfield Grammar sending to the families of Australians who send their sons there? That standing up for what is right is actually wrong, and that cheating should be tolerated? That is the sort of message which seems to be embedded into our export education system right now, and it obviously is starting to have an impact in the rest of the education system in its entirety.

Civil society and Australian democracy is under threat from various sources. One of those sources is the growing alienation from society and disillusionment in the political processes which many feel – the apathy, anger and anomie which are probably a result of our increasingly online lives and news cycles. But one of the other threats to civil society and democracy is the increasing economic dependence on Communist China, and the growing tolerance of the intentional interference which its representatives are exercising onshore in our society – or the fear of speaking out against it.

That Mack Horton has become, before this swimming pool issue came up, a poster boy for fair play is one thing. The alleged behaviour of Caulfield Grammar has propelled him to a greater status – he is now a symbol for what is going wrong in our civil society and democracy, the fear and greed which is propelling blindness to the motives of a tyrannical communist government which is trying to extend its tentacles into indirect control of our nation.

The best thing which Caulfield Grammar could now do for our nation and to honour Mack Horton, given the obvious contempt that I now feel for its leadership, is to name its swimming pool after Sun Yang. That would graphically and vocally illustrate to the public that there is a threat of us becoming, through our apathy, fear, and greed, a client state to Communist China,.

I consider myself as a personally conservative person, albeit someone who reluctantly describes himself as a libertarian (very reluctantly – I loathe the word). As such, I would have some guarded sympathy for the Liberal Party, albeit as someone who very much regards himself as an outsider looking in.

As a responsible and engaged citizen, I need to keep informed about such matters, given that I do not believe that we can ever take our democracy for granted.

At the moment, I am in a situation where I find myself wondering what Elvis would do, or, as he sang in one song:

Stop!

Look and Listen baby

That’s my philosophy

It’s called rubber necking baby

That’s all right with me!

You see, there appears to be a lot of dissension within the organisational base of the Victorian Liberal Party at the moment, based around a website and related email newsletter called Abalinx. Here, read the website for yourself: http://www.abalinx.com

The author of this website, retired army warrant officer and excessively enthusiastic Liberal Party volunteer Peter Adamis, currently, after publishing his epistles for some time, has incurred the wrath of the state executive of the Liberal Party, and appears to be facing some sort of hearing in March, which might result in expulsion or something such.

I do not know this chap, although I know, at least by reputation (and at best very vaguely), various of the people whom he names in his website and his related email newsletters.

I must say, on reading the various articles he publishes on his page, that I do not necessarily agree with him. He seems as enthusiastic about the Liberal Party as Joffa is about Collingwood Football Club, which is probably a little too one eyed for most people, including most Liberal sympathisers. However, unlike Joffa, he is not enthusiastic or uncritical about the organisational leaders of his beloved organisation, and that appears to be what has got him into trouble.

His writing sometimes is a little too obscure and rambling, and sometimes a little repetitive and critical in an ad hominem way, and sometimes too uncritical of those people with whom his sympathies lie (some of those people, to be honest, are perhaps best described as a-holes). And the writing is not that great.

However, putting his thoughts out there, in the way that he does (raising his dissent against matter which are shut down by the leaders of the supposedly grassroots based party he supports), is important for our democracy, especially at a time when Communist China has been buying many people within both of our major political parties with donations or consultant fees (look at Sam Dastiyari for example, or Santo Santoro, as frightening examples of the insidious attack on our democracy).

Transparency is important, especially at a time when the major political parties are becoming political machines increasingly unaccountable to either their members or their voting bases, and increasingly receptive to cheques from rich people who happen to be members of the Chinese Communist Party.

Expelling Peter Adamis from the Liberal Party would be a sad mistake. It would be better to expel the politicians and apparatchicks who accept fees and donations from members of the Chinese Communist Party, especially as the Liberal Party of Australia was established to be a Liberal, anti-Communist party, defending individual liberty.