it’s actually not true. Just about every “solid” company will be...

it’s actually not true. Just about every “solid” company will be destroyed by a prolonged viral outbreak. The Australian housing market would crash, there would be waves of personal bankruptcies, waves of middle management getting the sack, substantial cut in the pay of everyone else. Ultimately you need to have customers who will pay. So small businesses can’t pay their rent, the landlords don’t get their money, widespread dividend cut and eventually contagion even for B2B businesses when all their clients go bankrupt.

So actually this is a binary bet on to what extent local and global control is achieved. Most of the hard decisions have already been made. There is massive synchronised global fiscal stumulus. As ultimately all that money gets paid by the government (or not if you believe in MMT), the only way out is inflation. Have a look through crises as significant as this in history and how they’ve played out.

What the market is realizing is that nothing will be immune from this, we are all in this together (at least for the time being). So actually what we saw in the last couple of days is switch from low to high beta as this suddenly became apparent to people. What I expect is for the spread to narrow and, then when people realize what the endgame is going to be, a massive rally (my expectation) or drop. The reason why I think the virus will be controlled, is that we know that it can be done if there is a will (China, South Korea, Singapore). Governments around the world have flagged that there is a will to do so. It is now up to the rest of us to execute.

Afterpay is one of the best capitalized businesses on the ASX right now. Any business that runs on negative working capital that has a revenue hit right now will be shortly insolvent.