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.