CORONA ECONOMICS

As someone who hasn't had a cold or flu since secondary school, 
presumably due to very limited interaction with other humans and a 
strong (though still often momentarily forgotten) respect for the 
importance of hand washing (and finding very awkward ways to avoid 
touching a dirty tap / door handle etc. thereafter when exiting a 
public toilet - geeze that can be hard sometimes). As well as 
someone young and healthy enough to be at lowest risk. I'm not 
especially concerned about the virus itself affecting me.

Though even the small country supermarket that I visit has 
apparantly suffered from raids by unsatisfied city shoppers taking 
to the highways in search of pasta, meat, and anything with vague 
potential for the use of wiping one's bum. It's a worry, and so is 
talk about stores refusing to accept cash, because I refuse to have 
my purchase history tracked, and my bank account at risk of being 
hacked, due to use of electronic payments. As usual with 
international events, our government seems keen to mirror whatever 
policy the US implements, even though there seems to be relatively 
little parallel between the situation here verses there, except 
maybe a general desperation for dunny paper.

It's the economic matters that are of primary interest to me 
though. There was enough talk before the bushfires that the 
Australian economy was probably stuffed. After the bushfires it was 
even more probably stuffed, and now with this virus it looks like 
nobody's going to deny it anymore. The reserve bank is trying (as 
ever) to boost the property market, now by employing quantitative 
easing, even though all of the Chinese who were buying up property 
here aren't allowed in anymore due to the flight ban. As a result 
the Australain Dollar recently plunged down $0.20 compared to the 
USD, on the back of an already downward slope. So now that Chinese 
businesses are mostly open again, everything that they're selling 
has become a lot more expensive than before. Given that we import 
everything in this country, this means that prices are going to 
rise at the same time as lots of people will loose their income due 
to many businesses being unable to operate.

Curiously for my business I saw a surge of international sales at 
the start of the week, presumably due to the AUD falling and making 
my stuff cheaper. Past the middle of the week though they've 
dropped off entirely, So I guess people might have realised that 
the postal service could be affected, or simply got scared that 
they might need to hold onto their money for the bare essentials in 
case they loose their income. Now I'm also looking at the suddenly 
increased cost of ordering things from overseas, and wondering 
whether it's a good idea to reorder or whether nobody's going to 
buy anything until the panic is over and the AUD has bounced up a 
bit anyway, in which case I'll have needlessly over-paid for stock. 
Similarly if they stop running the post.

So that's a headache (better than a cough or sore throat these days 
I suppose :) ). But on the other hand I've been planning to get 
more serious about investing in shares, given that interest rates 
have been scraping the ground for years now. Now is clearly a cheap 
time to invest in big companies, with the hope that the virus 
doesn't send them entirely broke of course. Cruise lines are 
probably being hit pretty hard, but long term their prospects have 
to be pretty good given all of the baby boomer generation in the 
process of retireing and looking to spend their money on bobbing 
around in the ocean. Airlines won't be making new orders, but 
Airbus might have pretty weak competition from Boeing coming out of 
this (though it looks like the US gov. isn't going to let them go 
bust). Just some thoughts to start with. I've decided that next 
week I'll spend some days doing some hard research and make some 
real decisions, hopefully before the country decides to shut down 
entirely.

- The Free Thinker.