In a staggering response to a story this week, I’ve become the butt of a whole lot of anger in the ‘house of pain’ called Twitter. I have to say that the magnitude of the madness directed at me was the greatest ever and surpasses the aggressive responses when I dared to question the claims on 60 Minutes and the next day in the press in 2018, which told us that house prices in Australia would fall 40%.

I was surprised how certain quarters of Australia, who seem leftish and anti-capitalist inclined, really ripped into me for using economists, economic analysis and economic history to raise doubts over these HUGE price drop claims.

I have history with the “house prices will fall 40%” prediction after teaching with and then interviewing Professor Steve Keen after the GFC on my old Sky Business TV show. Steve was the first to predict that our crazy high household debt levels will eventually kill house prices by a number as big as 40%!

I always argued that we’d need a real recession with unemployment over 10% for anything like that to happen so I guess it could be on the cards now if we don’t see a vaccine show up before year’s end or at the latest early next year. That said, I don’t see anything like a 40% fall in house prices.

And it was on the subject of a vaccine that I copped it from all manner of angry people, who clearly hate Scott Morrison. The PM’s team told the AFR’s respected Phil Coorey that the Government had negotiated for a vaccine for 25 million Aussies.

This is what he wrote on Thursday: “The Morrison government has reached an agreement with British pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca to secure 25 million doses of a coronavirus vaccine that is under an advanced stage of development.” I wonder if Phil copped a bagging.

Yep, I’m guilty as charged for being an optimist, or even someone who loves the idea that a lot less Aussies will die because of a vaccine showing up ASAP. Or I might be simply someone who wants to believe that the PM has nailed a vaccine agreement when it’s available to help the economy.

In contrast, there are thousands of tweeters who won’t believe it, can’t believe it and are filthy angry that anyone would even be so naive to think the nation’s leader could be angling for such a gift to the country.

“It’s all spin from Scotty from Marketing”, is the outcry, which makes me wonder if marketing people one day will be afforded the respect of not being despised by groups, who have fought so hard for a fair treatment and now seem to becoming as bad as their former terrorizers!

I must say, if this is spin, it will come back to bite the PM big time. If a vaccine shows up in other countries and we’re on a queue waiting, his so-called spin will bounce him out of office.

One angry Twitter accuser was the Labor MP Doug Cameron, who tweeted something like “why would anyone expect Peter Switzer to give an unbiased view?”

Well, some of your colleagues might have Doug, because only three years ago I was contracted by your Labor Party to interview the then Shadow Treasurer, Chris Bowen, after Bill Shorten’s Budget reply.

Someone must have thought I was either an unbiased media person or maybe pro-Labor to ask me to do the job. In reality, I think I might have annoyed some party hardheads when I started my interview asking how Chris would defend Bill’s policy to crackdown on negative gearing, when the Daily Telegraph is bound to lead with a headline like: “Shorten to KO house prices?”

History shows that I lost a few Coalition fans during the GFC when I supported Kevin Rudd’s and Wayne Swan’s ‘spend and prosper’ approach, which was pushed by Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry, because it was the right policy for the time. It explained why unemployment did not go over 6% and why we avoided recession.

You see, I’m not tribal. I am a great fan of a lot of Paul Keating’s work as Treasurer but he screwed up interest rates, letting home loan interest rates go to 17%. However, many of his reforms explain why this country was able to grow for 29 years without a recession.

I call it as I see it and sometimes I’m wrong and sometimes I’m too optimistic or less cynical than I should be, but I have a pretty good accuracy rate when it comes to economic calls. And I’m also pretty good with stock markets as well, despite how hard they can be.

And after 35 years of public commentary in top newspapers, radio stations and TV programmes I’ve got used to one-eyed critics who disagree with me. Of course, it’s a lot easier nowadays for them with Twitter, compared to those days when someone had to write a letter, get a stamp and post it.

We live in a democracy and people are entitled to their view, but I wonder about the anger Twitter seems to generate. And it seems to build as nights grow older and colder and the consumption of red wine or scotch escalates, meaning some people’s need to correct me (so aggressively) increases nearly exponentially!

I’m no stranger to economics and aggression. When I first taught at the University of New South Wales, my fellow academics tried holding lunchtime papers but the nasty reactions of attendees who showed up reduced the numbers over time and the idea was dropped!

The poet William Blake said controversy should bring progress but at UNSW it brought anger, insults and silence.

But experts tell me that anger can actually be good for us. An excellent article in The Atlantic magazine, written by Charles Duhigg, recounted the findings of James Averill, a psychology professor at the University of Massachusetts.

His extensive study of anger led him to conclude that:

• Expressing anger resulted in all parties becoming more willing to listen, more inclined to speak honestly, more accommodating of each other’s complaints.
• People reported that they tended to be much happier after yelling at an offending party. They felt relieved, more optimistic about the future, more energized.  “The ratio of beneficial to harmful consequences was about 3 to 1 for angry persons,” Averill wrote.
• Even the targets of those outbursts agreed that the shouting and recriminations had helped.

They served as signals for the wrongdoers to listen more carefully and change their ways. More than two-thirds of the recipients of anger “said they came to realize their own faults,” Averill wrote. Their “relationship with the angry person was reportedly strengthened more often than it was weakened, and the targets more often gained rather than lost respect for the angry person.”

OK, so maybe with my story about ScoMo lining up a deal for vaccine, though creating anger might actually be good for those who have hurled insults at me. That makes the insults easier to cop, I think.

But wait, experts have a different take on anger and Twitter and they use Donald Trump to explain it.

Before his election win, Trump told CNN: “I’m angry, and a lot of other people are angry, too, at how incompetently our country is being run.” Trump continued: “As far as I am concerned, anger is okay. Anger and energy is what this country needs.”

As Averill watched, he felt a shock of recognition. Everyone believed Trump would be out of the race soon. But Averill wasn’t so sure. “He understands anger,” he thought to himself, “and it’s going to make voters feel wonderful.”

Those angry about rightish changes in society got no relief out of the 2016 US election result. Those who saw their candidate lose and have had to put up with Donald’s tweets have anger that doesn’t deliver the kind of positive results that Averill found in his survey.

“Ordinary anger can deepen, under the right circumstances, into moral indignation—a more combustible form of the emotion, though one that can still be a powerful force for good,” Duhigg writes. “If moral indignation persists, however—and if the indignant lose faith that their anger is being heard—it can produce a type of anger: a desire for revenge against our enemies that privileges inflicting punishment overreaching accord.”

Twitter is giving the anti-ScoMo types out there a platform to show that they’re angry, but they need more than that to get the benefits of being angry. The May 18 election was supposed to deliver the pay-off for those who have “maintained the rage”, as Gough recommended back in 1975. And every time ScoMo comes to the nation as an affable kind of PM, it turbo-charges the anger because it reminds angry haters of what should have been.

Twitter delivers short-term anger relief but there’s a simmering hate for the forces linked to the Coalition and anyone who dares to think that the Government has a good idea, policy or intended policy.

These people clearly need Labor to understand the Aussie voter/customer base and think outside the square to get themselves elected, or I suspect the angry tweeters will keep being angry and keep giving it to me.

Only a more electable Albo can save me!

For those interested in this intriguing look at anger have a look at: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2019/01/charles-duhigg-american-anger/576424/

I love a one liner that makes me think. And I love it even more if it makes me act! That’s when I get a double barrel shot at successfully changing myself.

I believe (and I’m not alone on this) that it’s our inability to change that explains a lot of our disappointments in life.

It staggers me how so many people want something that if they thought about it, they’d call success but somehow seem almost afraid to utter the desire to be successful. It’s like they have a concealed goal and want to keep it under wraps, so people don’t know what they want lest they fail and then have to deal with that failure.

My favourite Muhammad Ali quote underlines the value of articulating your goal for success. Ali once said: “It is the repetition of affirmations that leads to belief and once that belief becomes a deep conviction, things begin to happen.”

So the process is having a goal that turns into an affirmation, which is an action or process of affirming something. This gets repeated over and over and eventually the mind absorbs it and that leads to a belief. Then after a time and because of related success and advancement, that belief turns into a deep conviction.

Ali says that when all that occurs, “things begin to happen.”

Over the years I’ve used this quote to inspire people who were finding it hard to grow a business, get a promotion or build their wealth. But I’ve never actually looked into what else Ali did to turn his affirmation into a belief and then a deep conviction.

‘Talking the talk’ is the start and it’s an important point of commencement. But it’s the easy part. ‘Walking the talk’ can undermine the initially enthused because you start to realise how hard change and improvement really is. Ali did the walk, as Fortisfight.com revealed:

“Angelo Dundee (who was Muhammad Ali’s trainer) said when Ali couldn’t get a ride to the gym, he’d run to the gym and when he’d finished, he’d run all the way back home as well. His house to the gym was 7 miles and he’d do this regularly.

“When interviewed on what he usually does, he said that he wakes up at 5.30am and did some light stretching followed by a 6 mile run, which he'd usually do in 40 minutes. That’s just over 6 minutes a mile.”

Ali was ahead of his time favouring whole and natural foods but his strengthening was old school.

“When it came to training, Ali adapted an old school style of boxing training. He didn’t really lift weights and relied on calisthenic training like push ups, sit ups and pull ups,” Fortis.com tells us. “At times, he would do old school Rocky IV style training, like chopping wood, hitting sledgehammers on tyres and run while wearing heavy boots.”

One thing Ali was famous for was going public with his affirmation/goal, that is, he wanted to become what he said he was, even before that was effectively true. When he said “I am the greatest!”, that wasn’t true. But he inevitably proved that he was by the time his career was over. That was a huge effort. But I suspect his naming of his goal meant he had an incentive to avoid the failure that might led to the shaming he might have copped if he hadn’t delivered.

Not many of us would take a gamble like that but it is something we need to think about when we set goals for ourselves.

Jim Collins, author of a number of best-selling books including Good to Great, makes a big deal about those who’ve led world class businesses setting BHAGs — big, hairy, audacious, goals.

“Jim Collins says that in 1994 when he and his co-author Jerry Porras were writing the seminal book Built to Last, they debated what to call ambitious long-term goals that galvanize successful companies,” Leigh Buchanan of Inc.com writes. “Porras favored something businesslike and decorous, like “corporate mission.” Collins held out for a term that vividly conveyed the excitement, energy, and envelope-pushing boldness stirred up by such endeavours. He prevailed, and BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) came galumphing into the management lexicon.”

Collins says his analysis of successful people running successful businesses convinced him a BHAG stops you from thinking small.

“A great BHAG changes the time frame and simultaneously creates a sense of urgency,” Buchanan explains. “It’s a real paradox. So on the one hand, you’re not going to get a BHAG done in three years. You’re not going to get it done in five years. A really good BHAG probably has a minimum length of about a decade, and many take longer than that. Two decades. Three decades. So time frames extend to where you are no longer managing for the quarter but for the quarter century!”

When I think about that idea of having a big goal that might take a long time to come to reality, it makes me think about building wealth. In my book Join the Rich Club (I’m sure I’ve told you about this before!), I look at how $10,000 in the All Ords becomes over $450,000 over 1970 to 2009, which was one year after the stock market crash of 50% with the GFC.

By 1975 that $10,000 was about $2,000! Yes, it went down! Then by 1981 it was $30,000! By 1987 it was $100,000 but fell to $70,000 one year later! (These are just rough guesses off a Vanguard chart that shows the growth of the $10,000 between 1970-2009.) But what I’m trying to show you is that you can have these bad periods but if you’re strategy is good, it comes good time and time again.

This growth process to make a BHAG having a great retirement nest egg, reminds me of what John Maxwell, the author of the book The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership once told me, when I MC’d him in a conference in Dubai: “Leadership is not learnt in a day but daily.”

Yep, it’s a daily commitment to your BHAG that turns a goal/affirmation into a belief and eventually a conviction.

Inc.com gave us the seven steps to transform ourselves and they’re worth sharing. Here they are:

1. See yourself outside yourself.
2. Find the habit associated with the thing you want to change.
3. Practice every day, no matter what.
4. Set realistic goals.
5. Constantly look in the mirror to be objective about yourself and your performance.
6. Surround yourself with people who tell you the truth.
7. Take risks.

There are some things in life I can do myself but being realistic about myself I know I perform better when I have to be accountable to a coach, a mentor or someone I love or respect.

I recently set a goal to kill 7kgs to get back to my fighting weight. I knew I needed to weigh in each week. My dietician is a tough lady, who came to Australia some time ago from South Africa. She takes no crap or excuses.

I put in the hard yards but having this accountability helped me lose 5kgs in six weeks!

Accountability plus a desire to want to achieve the goal generally explains a good outcome. And this brings me to my favourite quote from former tennis great, Chris Evert.

How good was she?

Well, look at these stats:

• Singles — 90% success rate!
• Career titles — 157!
• Grand Slam Singles — 18!
• Grand Slam Doubles — 7.

What summed up her attitude? This: “There were times when deep down inside I wanted to win so badly I could actually will it to happen. I think most of my career has been based on desire.”

I think that says it all.

One of the hardest commodities to ‘sell’ is common sense! And when a person’s nest egg or super is involved, it’s even harder. After years of financial advice and financial education, I know using common-sense is the best approach to building wealth. But try telling that to the inexperienced and the nervous that it’s OK to lose capital for a certain period, when all they see is their hard-earned income disappear. This happened between February 20 and March 23 this year with the Coronavirus crash. I’m talking a 36.5% loss of capital, which has comeback but it’s still down 19% from before the fall.

S&P/ASX 200

So, if you retired late last year and had $1 million in your super fund, you could now have a little over $800,000 but you hear or read me saying that it’s OK. Before you call me an idiot and go back to reading stuff about the Coronavirus, high fashion and footie scores, give me a chance to explain.

In trying to preserve capital and make money at the same time, we put our clients into mixed portfolios of assets, with different exposures to growth assets (like stocks) and more defensive assets (like bond funds, hybrids, term deposits and so on). However, apart from term deposits, the value of these ‘defensive’ assets can be risky. And because term deposits were paying less than 1% before the Coronavirus crash, clients had to be more exposed to riskier defensive assets.

And they didn’t like it when their bond fund that had been paying 5% a year saw its unit price fall because it was listed on the stock market. Markets can do crazy things. We see this all the time when we see funds that have a real value or NTA (net tangible asset value) that is greater than what the market is prepared to pay for it.

So in many ways, unless you’re in term deposits, you are stuck with what sometimes mad, bad and dangerous financial markets want to do. And these suckers can play havoc with good quality assets and therefore your money. But it’s only a time thing, so what you have to learn to accept is that sometimes you’ll be relatively poorer for a time but then you’ll get richer, until the next crash comes along.

That takes guts and an understanding of what you lose when you want to avoid losing capital.

Before I show you that, have a look at what happens to your capital when you retire and you’re fully invested in the stock market.

The blue line shows how $10,000 of capital invested in 1970 went up and down over 30 years to 2009 and grew to $471,593 — that was one year after the stock market crashed 50% with the GFC.

In a perfect world, a great adviser would be able to get you out ahead of a crash and then get you back in at the bottom of the market. But let me tell you with all honesty, that’s easier said than done.

Sure, there are plenty of exotic strategies that can minimise your fall and maximise your rise but they all involve gambling, timing and hoping that someone like Donald Trump doesn’t create a trade war.

A better strategy is to explain to wealth-builders that stock markets return around 10% a year (including franking credits) over a 10-year period. And about half of that comes from dividends and franking credits for us here in Australia, where we pocket those tax giveaways. The Federal Reseve Bank of San Francisco produced a paper entitled: The Rate of Return on Everything and you can see what equities (shares) and housing have delivered over time.

The Federal Reseve Bank of San Francisco produced a paper entitled: The Rate of Return on Everything and you can see what equities (shares) and housing have delivered over time.

If you could get someone in Australia to commit to Australia’s best companies with at least 30 stocks in the portfolio and you biased them towards good dividend-payers, then you could actually get a stream of income around 5% on average.

And even though dividends will be reduced over the next two years, they will make a comeback as the economy improves. Those investors who play the dividend game have a game plan that works.

Consider this example. Someone retires with $2 million in their share super fund (with their partner). By the way, two teachers who were in teaching from 1975 could be in such a situation! They want $120,000 to live off, which means they need a 6% return. Generally, along with franking credits, that should be easily achieved and if a strategy is put in place to siphon off income when the stock market has ripper years, then a buffer could be created to help you see that $120,000 when dividends are beaten up. A buffer of say $80,000 might be needed to ensure that in bad years for dividends, the buffer can kick in money to top up what’s needed for a $120,000 life a year.

Ultimately, it’s the income that has to be managed. You’d only have to do some juggling in bad years when recessions and pandemics upset the apple cart. By playing too much defence, you bring a 10% return from stocks down to say 6%, which means your money doubles every 12 years. If you leave yourself exposed to the stock market, your money would double every 7 years.

That’s a big difference! The defensive stance really undermines your potential to grow your wealth in retirement. With us increasingly living longer, we need to play a more aggressive game. That’s why I prefer quality companies that are important for driving the stock market and have a great history of paying dividends.

Take a look at my Switzer Dividend Growth Fund, which was listed in late February 2017.

SWTZ

It wasn’t designed to shoot the lights out but supply a reliable income flow as term deposit interest rates fell and too many self-funded retirees were too exposed to five quality dividend paying stocks — the big four banks and Telstra. We rope these together into what we call the Mum & Dad Index.

I recently asked the fund manager Contango Asset Management (that manages SWTZ) to work out what dividend stream it has paid over the time it has been listed. SWTZ listed at $2.50 and crawled to $2.70 (with Donald Trump’s trade war and the Hayne Royal Commission no help to the capital growth of a fund with exposure to financial stocks among its 30-odd collection in the fund).

This is how we did over that time compared to the Mum & Dad Index:

You’ll see the the big banks plus Telstra did OK, delivering 16.4% over that time. But via diversification and investing in more dividend-payers than just five companies, we paid out 17.3% since listing.

Meanwhile, our capital loss thanks to Donald + Hayne + COVID-19 was 15.2% compared to 36.5% for the Mum & Dad stocks. So we’ve done what we set out to do. I know the total return for SWTZ is only plus 2.1% but it’s better than the negative 20.1% for the Mum & Dad crew.

But the more important point is that for the three years or so, SWTZ delivered net dividend income of 17.3%, while the Mum & Dad stocks returned 16.4%. That leaves out franking, so it would be more if we add in the tax ‘gift’ from the Government.

That’s a little less than 6% income a year for SWTZ and a little more than 5% for Mums & Dads, which considering the trying times makes a good case for chasing dividends as a core strategy.

Over coming years, capital gain will kick in. And when that happens, some shares can be sold and a buffer can be built up. If you go back to my second chart (which showed how the Australian stock market trends higher over time) as long as you are set to receive a good flow of dividends in great quality companies you don’t have to worry about what the crazy stock market decides to do to your capital or nest egg in the short term.

When you can’t get a decent return out of safe term deposits, it’s best to be diversified into a large range of quality companies/assets that pay reliable income.

SWTZ won’t do as well for income in the year ahead, as banks reduce or kill their dividends. But that’s why my fund has 38 stocks in it. Most of these companies won’t be forced to cut dividends because they’re not a part of the Government’s rescue strategy. This means that unlike what they’re telling the banks to do, APRA won’t be ordering most of the companies in my fund to cut their dividends! I love capital gain but I know it’s not reliable year to year, while dividends are much more dependable. That said, over a decade, capital gain historically is a pretty good giver.

As we all know, the invention and proliferation of the Internet has led to a spectacular expansion of new age businesses. Intriguingly, these commercial operations are often opinion based. To be honest, I’ve made a nice living out of offering my opinion.

This has helped create a good business for Switzer Financial Group with my opinions on the economy, the stock market, investing, buying property assisting our financial planning clients and Switzer Daily readers in building wealth. But the trend in opinions worries me.

Experts on millennials tell me they learn from each other, which can have some merit. And while I’m in the market to learn from this demographic (that is always wired) when it comes to anything IT, telco and social media, I don’t want to be taught ‘stuff’ by many of them on subjects where they don’t have strength.

And that’s the trouble with the Internet and its partners in opinion crime — Facebook, Twitter and so on.

Sure you might say: “Well, you appointed yourself an opinion writer on Switzer Daily…”, and you’d be right. But I put the years in earning my qualifications and then media outlets appointed and paid me to share my knowledge in the form of an opinion.

Those media outlets I’m talking about started with The Daily Telegraph, The Sun-Herald and the The Australian when it came to newspapers. On radio, the sequence was Triple M to MIX 106.5 to ABC Sydney and Adelaide, to Qantas Talking Business to 2UE to 2GB. On TV, the long-standing requests for my opinion came from the Sky Business channel and Sky News. And in all these cases, someone had to select me to give my opinion on a subject.

And the basis of those selections were my qualifications to talk on the economy because of my former academic positions teaching economics and then 35 years of covering business, finance, economics and politics at the coalface.

Of course, it doesn’t mean I have to be right but it does say I have experience. And people in power must have thought I had the intellectual grunt to at least one side of an argument. Anyone who really knows me knows that I do try to show both sides of an argument before deciding which one is the more compelling.

When I was younger, I was more left-leaning. Over time, I became more of a centrist, with a leaning to more measured approaches to solving economic/social/political problems. But one thing I hope I’ve become known for is that I seldom play the person and rip into that person.

Even in the last election, I opposed a few of Bill Shorten’s policies but never questioned Bill’s integrity, as others felt comfortable doing.

So this is my best qualification for questioning this trend for non-experts getting into the opinion and commentary caper.

Seriously, why are young people taking advice from other young people who have such limited knowledge on stocks? Why are there so many experts on climate change from both the left and the right?

When I wrote a book called The Carbon Crunch in 2008, I could not argue that humans were the main cause for our changing climate. But I could convincingly argue that a majority of people were starting to believe that humans were the cause, and businesses like coal mines and energy suppliers were going to have to get ready for changes being imposed on them.

I wish young people could start telling their fellow young people that the best advice they have for each other is to seek out those people who have the brains and the experience to build up a collection of views that will be a great foundation for getting wiser and smarter over time.

I love this quote as I believe it to be very instructive: “Good judgment comes from experience. And experience? Well, that comes from bad judgment.” 

Some people attribute that quote to Dean Martin, who was a masterful one-line merchant (despite his drinking) but I have no proof. But it tells all newcomers to the world of commentary to be committed to getting better at being a good judge.

That will never happen by believing you’re always right, just because you think it. Try to hang out with people who are better than you. And be open to learning new stuff. One of the best things you can learn is not to be an aggressive name caller and call-out merchant.

I have commentator mates who lecture people every weekend in major media outlets who have forgotten their own past. It’s great that they have progressed from being bombastic smart Alec heavy-boozing womanizing and misogynists to modern day moralizers on how one should live, but can they do it with a little less aggression.

The language of the tribal left with tags such as “slut shaming” and “sexualizing” seems to be going too far on purpose to sensationalize a story to get followers and eyeballs.

It’s like the social media world has been ‘Kyle Sanderlandized”. Or is ‘Kyle Slanderlized’?

Kyle has made a successful career out of doing controversial radio but I don’t think he’s the greatest example when it comes to breeding a new generation of commentators.

When I started in newsprint and radio, I sometimes had newspaper and radio station lawyers ask me: “Why would you want to say that?” or “Could you say that without opening us up to a lawsuit?”

Jia Tolentino (The New Yorker writer and author of Trick Mirror) succinctly explained what the Internet has done to the new world of commentary.

She referred to Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, which suggested we’re looking at people with a new and very harsh eye. “We became keenly watchful for transgressions [in 2012],” he wrote. “After a while, it wasn’t just transgressions we were keenly watchful for. It was mis-speakings. Fury at terribleness of other people had started to consume us…In fact, it felt weird and empty when there wasn’t anyone to be furious about.”

Jia implies the older world of thoughtful, respectful and balanced criticism, which once could have been seen as “…surprising and rewarding and curious, became tedious, noxious and grim.”

The new world aggressive tribal commentator seems to love to be outraged and is lost without it.

Sure, I get it when a group that has been discriminated against for a long time starts to get the upper hand in the social debate. It’s nice to wield newfound power but it doesn’t make it right.

And what’s also worrying for me is when non-experts pedal advice based on their best guess or on the strength of a persuasive but ill-qualified opinion maker.

Personally, I don’t mind being criticised respectfully on social media platforms, especially when I get to learn something. But I don’t like to be lectured by inexperienced experts who simply come from a different tribe.

This week I gave an economic forecasting speech to a group of lawn farmers. From the outset I made excuses because I neither studied nor taught Pandemics 101 at my alma mater (the University of New South Wales) where I studied and eventually taught economics.

The excuse was simply that the course of COVID-19 infections and the arrival time for a vaccine are too difficult for anyone to forecast with confidence.

Inexplicably, there are ‘experts’ who are sure that a vaccine won’t show up until 2021 at the earliest, despite the fact that Dr Anthony Fauci, the top virus-fighting medico in the US, only said last week that a vaccine by the end of the year is looking like a good possibility.

In last weekend’s AFR column, Chris Joye put it this way: “Yet as a result of record public funding and support for COVID-19 vaccine research, Fauci has embraced a more optimistic assessment,” Joye wrote. “Following the release this week of the results of the first human trial of Moderna’s vaccine, which triggered the desired immune response in all 45 people tested, Fauci declared that the US was on track to develop a vaccine before the end of the year. ‘I feel good about the projected timetable,’ Fauci said.”

So I ask: why isn’t that the headline that media outlets run with for at least a day? The answer lies in the agenda the media is programmed to deliver. As my old colleague at Sky News, Mike Willesee, the younger, said to me in an ad break, while I sat beside him at the 6pm news desk: “Switz, if it bleeds, it leads.”

And I get it because sometimes I use scary headlines to capture eyeballs and ears but I do endeavour then to put the fear into perspective by trying to look at both sides of the story.

The truth used to be pretty important to those participating in the news delivery game. Unfortunately, tribalism has meant one-sided commentary rules and it’s not OK!

In my presentation, I outlined the following good stuff that anyone in business needs to know:

• The Government’s JobKeeper programme has saved 700,000 jobs.
• 960,000 businesses and 3.5 million workers have benefitted from the policy.
• The extension of the JobKeeper programme in a tiered format will help the economy beat the current recession.
• We might be “out of the office” and at home but we are spending. ‘Preliminary’ retail trade rose by 2.4% in June, after rising by a record 16.9% in May (highest in 38 years of records). Retail spending is up 8.2% on the year and above the levels recorded pre-pandemic!
• Home prices haven’t collapsed as predicted. The latest report from Domain this week showed: House prices were down 2% nationally; Melbourne was down 3.5%; Sydney -2%; Brisbane -1.4%; Adelaide up 0.2%; Perth -1.5%; Hobart up 1.4%; Canberra up 4.1% Darwin -1%.
• The AiGroup’s Performance of Manufacturing Index rose by a record 9.9 points to 51.5 in June. A number over 50 says the sector is expanding!
• Before Victoria’s new crisis, the OECD said we were the third best economy for handling the virus.
• Our public debt to GDP was 50%, which is low by global standards. And the RBA Governor says this level makes the Government’s huge stimulus programme, which could take the Budget Deficit to $200 billion this financial year, manageable.
• Despite the political trouble, spiced up by President Trump, our most important trading partner, China, is the first economy into positive growth in 2020. China is now growing by 3.2%.
• On Tuesday, the EU agreed to a 750 billion euros Recovery Plan.
• While our Deficit could be 9% of GDP, the Yanks are heading to 15% of GDP, which means they’re throwing the ‘kitchen sink’ at their problem.
• The chief economist at Morgans, Michael Knox, thinks if a vaccine plays its role and the worst of the infections gets behind us, then we could be in for a rerun of the 20^th century’s Roaring 20s because the amount of promising fiscal spending, worldwide, will produce spectacular growth. The EU thinks its shared economic region will grow by 6.1% in 2021. That’s roaring growth, if ever I’ve seen it.

But my optimism rests on the arrival of a vaccine and intelligent handling of the infection threats before that miracle cure arrives.

On the chances of a vaccine coming sooner rather than later, I showed the past two weeks of news items that suggest positivity isn’t misplaced:

• Shares in Novavax rose 31.6% after being awarded a US$1.6 billion government contract to test, manufacture and commercialise a COVID-19 vaccine.
• Meanwhile, The Sunday Times newspaper reported that the UK government is closing in on a £500 million supply deal (with Sanofi and GlaxoSmithKline) for 60 million doses of a potential virus vaccine. 
• Gilead Sciences said its Remdesivir “was associated with an improvement in clinical recovery and a 62% reduction in the risk of mortality.”
• But wait, there’s more. CNBC says “BioNTech’s CEO also told The Wall Street Journal the company’s coronavirus vaccine candidate could be ready for approval by December. The company’s US-listed shares rose 5%.”
• And even a local company, Recce Pharmaceutical, which presented at our Switzer microcap conference earlier this year (I interviewed the MD in May) has seen its share price spike 52%, after the CSIRO included its products in its testings and search for a COVID-19 solution.
• And recent Oxford Uni results were hailed as “very promising”. So too were Moderna’s drug trials by respected authorities.

Add the Fauci view to these revelations and it’s not crazy to be hopeful. But what about the ‘here and now’ and until a vaccine shows up?

That’s where our leaders have to step up. Clearly, the Premiers of WA, SA and Queensland can point to their infection rates and claim they’re doing their job.

Victoria’s Daniel Andrews has mismanaged his state by not risk managing for the testosterone of irresponsible security guards and their partners in crime — Coronavirus sirens allegedly ‘self-isolating’ in hotel rooms!

And in New South Wales, the jury is out on Gladys Berejiklian, who has done a reasonable job until recently. Rising infection rates make me more objective on her and the leadership of others.

In Victoria, it took scary escalations of infections to make Dan become the man and force his state to mask up.

I’ve been arguing for masks for at least two months because I’m a ‘pathetic’ economist who thinks there’s a lot of value in the philosophy that if anything is worth doing, it’s worth doing for money!

You don’t have to be David Speers or Michelle Grattan to work out that Dan and Gladys weren’t happy to unsettle their voters by making them wear masks. Like me, most Aussies would hate wearing those damn things. But sometimes leaders have to lead and make their followers act like adults.

This Coronavirus is not only a serious threat to the lives of the elderly and those with dodgy health, it could KO our economy, kill businesses and send workers to the dole queue.

This week the Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo scolded people who were out at bars and restaurants, not observing social distancing guidelines or wearing masks. And in a gutsy stance, our leaders could learn from, he threatened to reverse the reopening plan if guidelines are not followed and enforced!

Anyone who has been in the real world since we embraced re-openings must have seen thousands of people getting back to normal. When friends sitting in pubs side by side, no one looks three pizza boxes apart!

Runners nearly sideswipe you panting. And you hope they don’t carry the virus, particularly when you haven’t opted for mask protection. We’re screwing up. People will get sick and the economy could be put back into semi or full hibernation.

If that happens, the fickle finger of fate will blame our leaders who have lacked the Churchillian or Thatcherite steel to tell us what we don’t want to hear. Ordinarily, these two people aren’t my favourite kind of people but when the chips are down, I want gutsy, no-nonsense leaders/mentors who see the way and are prepared to gamble to tell it the way it is for a greater good.

By the way, Governor Cuomo isn’t just scolding people. Like a smart leader, he’s recruited the likes of actor Morgan Freeman, Robert De Niro and Grey’s Anatomy’s Ellen Pompeo, along with other big stars, to sell the idea of masking up.

As an educator and therefore a leader of students, I know any trick in the book to help people learn and succeed is fair game. In fact, it’s a leader’s duty to do so, that is, a good leader.

A close friend of mine in Milan passed away when the city was in COVID-19 lockdown. He died of an issue not related to the Coronavirus. David was one of the smartest and greatest guys I’ve met and his wife had to cope by herself in that crazy closed city, which meant her beloved husband didn’t have a proper farewell.

She faced a tragic personal crisis within a global pandemic crisis and her friends and family couldn’t come to her rescue. This virus not only infects humanity’s health but imbeds negativity that needs to be addressed and hopefully exterminated like the virus itself.

A Federal Government politician confessed to me that he was worried about the psychological effects of the Coronavirus, which I’m sure many Victorians are being unnerved by following the return to stage 3 restrictions.

As an economist I worry about the impact of this decision on consumer confidence, the job losses, bankruptcies and the economic rebound that was looking good until those risk-taking security guards in quarantine hotels decided to get more ‘on the job’ than they were paid to do! But as a business owner, employer and family leader, I worry about what the Coronavirus confidence effects are having in a cumulative way.

And I was staggered when I read and thought about something that our resident cardiologist, Dr Ross Walker, has been lecturing us about for years.

The good doctor has often argued that stress can lead to a heart attack so it got me thinking about how we get too preoccupied with the negative and often ignore the positives in our lives.

A friend of mine was ‘lectured’ by her son when she was worried about a relative who was giving her an emotional bad time. The younger wiser offspring asked why she was so focused on the one negatively-inclined person in her life when there were so many positively-inclined and supportive loved ones.

It’s a good question we need to ask ourselves on a regular basis. And it reminds me of my great former radio legend colleague — Doug Mulray — who once confessed he didn’t like live gigs because he was inclined to worry about the one person who looked like he wasn’t on board with his humour, despite the fact that 99.9% were!

Here was a guy who was number one on Sydney radio for years with a huge audience but the one dissenter unnerved him face-to-face. Clearly, he could cope with criticism because his show was riotously funny and at times very controversial but the odd face-to-face critic was an issue for him.

I must confess when I started on the speaking circuit, the odd person who walked out worried me a bit too, until an old stager on the speaking circuit pointed out that a lot of leavers were smokers and those with unreliable bladders.

That insight taught me that you have to deal with negatives and work out whether they’re really important or not.

But many are worried about this damn virus (for good reason). But are we giving it too much negative recognition for our own good? “Prolonged bouts of anger can take the toll on the body in the form of high blood pressure, stress, anxiety, headaches and poor circulation,” writes US cardiologist, Dr Cynthia Thaik, in Huffington Post. “Research also shows that even one five-minute episode of anger is so stressful that it can impair your immune system for more than six hours. All of these health issues can lead to more serious problems, such as heart attacks and stroke.”

OK, so Ross and Cynthia are on the same page, giving us good advice that our hearts are at risk if we get too stressed about important things like the Coronavirus, bad friends or relatives or how crappy our footie team is! Fortunately, the Sydney Roosters are doing the right thing for my ‘jam tart’ but I do worry about other footie fans who take their game and teams too seriously. And it’s especially worrying when you realise that God has played a nasty trick on us all by hotwiring us for negativity and therefore heart attacks! And if you want to blame Him or Her for the Coronavirus and not Xi Jinping, then God has a lot to answer for! It seems wise if we go looking for some sensible ways to dodge a heart attack.

Yep, you would’ve thought the divine-maker might have had us inclined towards the positive but psychologists think we’re negative types.

Kerry Chendra writing in verywellmind.com explained what is called our Negative Bias. And she got me in with this: “Have you ever found yourself dwelling on an insult or fixating on your mistakes? Criticisms often have a greater impact than compliments, and bad news frequently draws more attention than good. The reason for this is that negative events have a greater impact on our brains than positive ones. Psychologists refer to this as the negative bias (also called the negativity bias), and it can have a powerful effect on your behaviour, your decisions, and even your relationships.”

Research says we’re more likely to make important decisions based on negative information rather than positive stuff.

In 1984 in American Psychologist, Nobel Prize-winning researchers D. Kahneman and A. Tversky showed that when making decisions, people consistently place greater weight on negative aspects of an event than they do on positive ones.

I hate to be too simplistic but being negative is really negative for your health and happiness and it has to affect your productivity and success.

So what do the experts suggest you use to beat this God-given deathly predisposition, which is made especially worse as the Coronavirus continues to hover? Try this:

• Abandon negative self-talk by reflecting on past mistakes that have taught valuable lessons.
• Try to reframe the negative issue into a more positive light. For example, I suggested in March when our national lockdown began, that you use the time to read the stuff you never have time for that could make you better at work or in your business or in your social life.
• Embrace new reactions/patterns to negative thoughts. Imagine if you promised to do 20 push-ups when you held a negative, going-nowhere thought for too long and just think how strong you’d get?
• Make a big deal out of positive events in your life. Call people, reward yourself and share the happiness!

Given how threatening negativity is, I recommend that you actually make a big commitment to kill unhelpful, going-nowhere negativity, which only leads to you stewing on the issue rather than fixing it or fixing you!

Dr Thaik says there are some smart steps to kill anger and hatred, which ultimately is born out of negativity, and can end in a deathly heart attack. Here’s what she recommends:

1. Acknowledge your anger. 
2. Realise why you are angry or feeling hateful. 
3. Step back for a moment, take some deep breaths and try to let it go to get calm.
4. Deal with the issue and find a solution. 
5. Talk to people about what's on your mind. 
6. Let go of unhealthy thought patterns. 

And Cynthia gives us some good advice: “If you find yourself always thinking the worst about others and/or yourself, try to retrain your mind to think more positively. If you can let negative thought patterns go and start to appreciate the good in life, you will find that you have less to be angry about, better health and a happier disposition.”

A lot of people and families have really had to face some real problems in their lives because of the Coronavirus. If this terrible virus teaches us anything, it should be that we really can be unnecessarily negative about trivial issues.

Who the f——k is Ryan Holiday? And why am I reading this young millennial and learning something great every day? And yes, this seems like a rude way to praise someone but all I’m doing is expressing how I felt when I heard about this guy’s background and then how it didn’t get much better when I saw him! This isn’t what I expected when I laid eyes on the guy who I thought had grasped the insights of the ancient philosophers like Marcus Aurelius and Seneca so well that he made it easy for someone like me to feel lucky that I was growing from their insights. These insights were explained to me by this guy, who I’ve never heard of, called Ryan Holiday.

Given his grasp of what Marcus, Seneca et al, who were telling us about how we should be leading our lives, I had this idea that Ryan was an enlightened academic. Yep, someone, who had realised that the philosophers’ pearls of wisdom were only ever going to be really appreciated by those who need guidance, if someone had the nerve to dumb it down and make it accessible.

Ryan is that man, but wait a minute, he’s no ex-academic, like me, who has tried to do exactly what he’s been doing but not in the cerebral world of philosophy. Instead I’ve been translating the confusing and complicated world of economics and money.

So if he’s not an academic, what are his credentials for being an interpretive expert on the great brains of the ancient world, whose brainpower has stood the test of time?

Let me give you Ryan’s CV. Here goes: Apart from being a college dropout, his greatest achievement seems to be the former Director of Marketing for the now defunct American Apparel! Wikipedia says his big claim to fame, it seems, before becoming a great writer of very successful books was that “he has been responsible for a number of media stunts.”

But his books are not media stunts. They’re consumed by thoughtful people who really think he has nailed some of the more important questions of life with absolutely insightful answers.

His early books showed where he came from:

1.  Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator — debuted on the Wall Street Journal’s (WSJ) bestseller list
2. Growth Hacker Marketing — this made Inc.com’s top 10 marketing books of 2014.
3. The Obstacle Is the Way: The Timeless Art of Turning Trials into Triumph — WSJ #1 bestseller list.
4. Ego Is the Enemy — made four bestseller lists in the USA.
5. The Daily Stoic — debuted on the USA Today bestseller’s list as well as the WSJ bestseller’s list, where it remained for 11 weeks and ranked as high as #2.

Don’t get me wrong, I really rate this young guy and love what he’s been telling me about the ancient philosophers of the world and I know people who have genuinely benefited from his work.

But how did a marketing manipulator cross the Rubicon and go from spinning marketing shyte to helping people with the hurdy gurdy spinning world of modern man?

Well, he does write The Daily Stoic, with a co-author called Steve Hanselman, so is he the philosopher aficionado who helped a great communicator make philosophy accessible?

This is Steve’s CV: Stephen Hanselman has worked for over three decades in publishing as a bookseller, publisher and literary agent. He is a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, where he received a Master's degree while also studying extensively at Harvard's philosophy department.

OK, Steve looks like a hobbyist philosopher but it’s the voice of Ryan that seems to dominate when I read this stuff but maybe I’m hearing two voices and I simply don’t know it! That said, this is what Amazon tells me about the guy: “RYAN HOLIDAY is one of the world's foremost thinkers and writers on ancient philosophy and its place in everyday life.”

And here’s what a lot of successful people say about this guy:

• “Ryan Holiday is one of his generation’s finest thinkers…” — Steven Pressfield, author of the New York Times bestseller “The War of Art”.
• “Holiday is part Machiavelli, part Ogilvy, and all results…this whiz kid is the secret weapon you’ve never heard of.” — Tim Ferriss, author of “The 4-Hour Workweek and Tools of Titan”.
• “Ryan Holiday is one of the most promising young writers of his generation.” — George Raveling, Hall of Fame Basketball Coach, Nike’s Director of International Basketball
• “I don’t have many rules in life, but one I never break is: If Ryan Holiday writes a book, I read it as soon as I can get my hands on it.” — Brian Koppelman, screenwriter and director, Rounders, Ocean’s Thirteen and Billions
• “[The Obstacle Is the Way is] a book for the bedside of every future—and current—leader in the world.” — Robert Greene, author of “The 48 Laws of Power and Mastery”.
• “It’s rare that I finish a book then immediately reread it, this time with a yellow marker in hand…I can’t recommend [Ego is the Enemy] highly enough.” — Kevin Rose, entrepreneur and technology investor.
• “[The Daily Stoic is] a generous gift of guidance on modern living culled from a canon of wisdom hatched long ago.” —Maria Popova, editor of Brain Pickings.

I really don’t know how he does it but Ryan Holiday does it fantastically well and even with his less than auspicious academic history, his insights are unbelievably helpful and lifechanging.

Go Ryan! You’ve discovered the Philosophers’ Stone that has turned the often indecipherable and therefore valueless work of philosophy to the common man, who really needs it, into GOLD! You are a “f­reakin’ beauty!”

A then-and-now approach to philosophy. Here’s an extract from The Daily Stoic.

Seneca: “Good people will do what they find honorable to do, even if it requires hard work; they’ll do it even if it causes them injury; they’ll do it even if it will bring danger. Again, they won’t do what they find base, even if it brings wealth, pleasure or power. Nothing will deter them from what is honorable, and nothing will lure them into what is base.”

Ryan Holiday: “If doing good was easy, everyone would do it. (And if doing bad wasn’t tempting or attractive, nobody would do it.) The same goes for your duty. If anyone could do it, it would have been assigned to someone else. But instead it was assigned to you. Thankfully, you’re not like everyone. You’re not afraid of doing what is hard. You can resist superficially attractive rewards. Can’t you?”

I know this might sound disrespectful of a high achiever like the co-founder of Four Pillars Gin, Stu Gregor, but this is a guy who has literally created a business model where he has drunk his way to the top!

And I have actually watched him do exactly that as he went from creating a start-up PR business called Liquid Ideas in the 1990s, into making the stuff he so effectively markets now (did I say he’s been drinking his way to the top?). He did that first with a wine label called Donny Good Mac, which gave him and his partners the street smarts to eventually create a gin business with retail sales of around $35 million and has led to beer giant Lion Nathan buying half the business.

This is the stuff of most business owners’ dreams. You start a business you love, where you love the product, you have to consume it — for business purposes! — and then along comes a giant multinational who offers you a bucket load of money to help you grow it even bigger.

Now that’s something worth popping a bottle of bubbly over. But Stu Gregor has been popping bubbly for nearly two decades in business after starting Liquid Ideas with his business partner Angie Bradbury.

These two were legitimately the real world “odd couple”, where Stu was Jack Klugman and Angie was a female version of Tony Randall.

My insights on this spectacular success story go back to the early 1980s when I taught Stu at Sydney Grammar School. Not only was he a Commerce and then Economics student of mine, he also played fullback for me in the 2^nd XV, where he never really covered himself in glory in that position.

The next year when I left SGS to start a PhD and tutor at the University of New South Wales, he went on to play on the wing in the 1sts and even got selected in the GPS rep team! He could’ve been a better player for me but also I could have been a better coach!

He eventually became a News Corp journalist. After six year in that gig, he pursued his hobby — drinking and living the high life. First by getting some real wine-life experiences in Chablis in France before enrolling in a higher degree course in viniculture, which sent him on the road to becoming a “wine expert”, which he’d hate me for calling him, but you can say what you like about your mates.

I’m giving you a potted history of Stuart because those who didn’t know him might have had a brush with him and might have underestimated his potential. But his story is an inspiration for anyone who wants to achieve at a high level.

That decision to study viniculture, which was followed up by him enrolling in a Masters of Marketing course at Melbourne Uni, showed at a young age that he had an inclination to hang out with the right people. And while there he found the right potential business partner in Angie, who had been a young gun McDonald’s manager. Stu struck gold as Macca’s not only pick the best to lead, they make them even better!

Liquid Ideas was founded to help fledgling wine companies in the 1990s, when some great new labels were starting to see the light of day. The pair helped these businesses get column inches in newspapers and magazines when that’s what people read before the Internet seized control of our eyeballs.

They turned winemakers into TV and radio personalities and Stu became a PR version of Len Evans, entertaining all and sundry with his theatrics and great relationship-building character. Meanwhile Angie laid down the systems that had been engrained in her from her days at the ‘Golden Arches’.

Keeping Stu grounded was his wife, Sally, who was a widely respected Fairfax journalist in her time and Liquid Ideas went from strength to strength.

But Stu always had a hankering to do more than just help flog great wines. He wanted to make wine so he paired with some well-skilled friends and Donny Good Mac was born.

This is what renowned wine expert — a real wine expert — James Halliday said of the wine:

“The improbable name is a typically whimsical invention of the three proprietors: Donny is contributed by Stuart Gregor, whose marketing and PR prowess has hitherto prevented an entry for the venture in the Wine Companion. Kate Goodman is the (genuinely) good part of the team, while Cameron MacKenzie is the ‘mac'. Kate and Cameron both work full-time at Punt Road, where Kate is chief winemaker. What started as a little bit of fun in 2002 (less than 50 dozen made) has grown to the dizzy heights of 600 dozen, utilising old-vine shiraz from the Pyrenees, and chardonnay and cabernet sauvignon from a couple of old vineyards in the Coldstream area of the Yarra Valley.”

As you can see, James knows Stu and underlines his PR prowess but he also pointed out how he has quality companions, which is a lesson for all success story aspirants.

James and his wine writings have been legendary and the aficionados lap up every word he pens. But in 2006 Stu got into the writing caper producing a book that should not have shot the lights out in sales with a title like “Don’t Buy Wine Without Me”. Marketing experts say “Don’t” doesn’t work in headlines but it worked for Stu as it became a best seller.

This is what the QDB books reviewer said about his wine guide: “The irrepressible Stuart Gregor, columnist for the Sunday Herald Sun and the Sunday Telegraph, is once more on hand to present the best Australian and imported wines available in Australia. He also includes awards for this year's best value wines and wineries, a guide to winemaking regions, an extensive glossary, full- colour bottle shots, and codes throughout. Informative, fun and user-friendly, Don't Buy Wine Without Me is fast becoming the most popular guide of its kind on the market…”

You can see how he has used all manner of media to get his company name out there and his force-of-nature personality (helped by a strong team) meant Liquid Ideas became a go-to PR team for those in wine and then food and other businesses wanting exposure.

But how did Four Pillars come along?

Did I say Stu liked a drink? Well, he says while having a gin with some mates (Cameron Mackenzie and Matt Jones) some seven years ago that they lamented the poor quality of the typical tonic water that they had to mix with their gin and resolved to make a better tonic water!

That might have been the grog talking but after some investigations into how to make a better tonic water, they realized that they were ill-qualified to compete with Schweppes and the like, and realised with their wine-making backgrounds maybe they could teach gin-makers a thing or two.

And that’s exactly what they’ve done! And Lion Nathan agrees, which is why it has backed the trio in making Four Pillars a huge international brand.

Right now, the business has been battling the perils of COVID-19, with 20% of the company’s sales in export markets and duty-free outlets especially important for the annual turnover. In an interview I conducted with Stu on Wednesday for my Switzer Show podcast, he explained that before the virus came to town, they were set to start selling Four Pillars in some of the biggest duty free shops in the world but that’s on hold until we all can fly overseas again.

Not to be outdone, Stu and his team have created the Four Pillars Lab, which combines their stills in a laboratory-like setting, along with a cocktail bar called Eileen’s.

What are the big take-outs from the Gregor success story? Try this: pursue quality with the products and services you sell, hang out with quality performers and continually work at marketing your business like your life depends on it.

And I think you have to really love what you are selling. In Stuart’s case, his efforts were a labour of love because he was flogging what he truly loves — a nice drink!

(If you want to hear Stu’s story from the ‘horse’s mouth’, go to https://switzer.com.au/the-experts/switzer-podcast/how-four-pillars-gin-became-a-global-sensation/ )

On Sunday there’s going to be an online event promoted by the irrepressible Max Markson involving two guys I’ve never heard of but according to Max, they’re legends!

And they could be but I’ve simply never hear of them. On that subject, I recently did a story on Zig Ziglar, who I think is a legend, but I guess many of you have never heard of him.

The stars of Max’s promoted show are Les Brown, who apparently is “the world’s #1 motivational speaker, a living legend who has overcome poverty, racism, setbacks, divorce, the loss of loved ones, family tragedies, terminal cancer, and even an opioid addiction.”

And then there’s Dr.Willie Jolley, the world’s #1 inspirational speaker, is the bestselling author of “A SETBACK IS A SETUP FOR A COMEBACK” and in 2006 to 2009 helped the Ford Motor Company go from the brink of bankruptcy to billion dollar profits. He is known as the “Comeback King”. 

As a one-time normal Australian, when I was younger, I was instantly suspicious of fast-talking Yanks passing themselves off as motivational or inspirational speakers/trainers/coaches or whatever they think will get people in. But since those days, I’ve become an abnormal Australian and it means I give these guys and gals the benefit of the doubt.

But others, such as academic, Dr Bobby Hoffman, who makes a bit of a career out of telling us that these talk-up merchants are “Dead wrong!”

This is how he opened his piece in Psychology Today: “I often bring a magic wand to my face-to-face seminars and university classes. The audience usually emits a loud chuckle when I ask for a volunteer and proceed to wave my magic wand over their head and declare them “motivated.”

That’s a great prop gag but what’s his argument for pooh-poohing people who think they motivate someone to lose weight, get fit, start being focused and generally turning something bad for you into something good?

The good doc scoffs at those books that virtually say: “…simply following the author’s guidance you will instantly become motivated.”

And I have to agree but I am curious about his reference to “motivational science”. This has to be the kind of stuff that psychologists would be fascinated about and it has got me intrigued.

Bobby tells the stories of gurus subject to abject misery and misadventure in their early lives and how they became winners, but he argues that these “do as I do and you too will succeed” stories have no real provable history.

He insists that “motivation cannot be mandated” in either spoken words or in a book or video. So, how does it work? Come on Bobby, give us the good oil for motivation transference.

Once again you can’t argue with him when he says their “one-size-fits-all” advice based on their experience has not been scientifically tested to work in a general way. He’s also right when he says it’s hard to debunk their claims because the teacher of motivation can argue the student didn’t follow the script to the letter. Finally, in Bobby’s book — there’s always a book for motivators and motivator doubters — he tells us “motivational solutions will change based on the person and problem.” Generalisations to change someone has to have a hit or miss aspect to it.

I can’t take issue with much of what Bobby puts up for a decent argument, but he has one problem and it’s linked to his failure to concede there is value in these motivational ‘snake oil’ merchants.

These people are wrong to have a message that goes like this:

• You’ve got failure and you want success
• Change this aspect of you, and
• You will succeed.

That’s too simplistic and anyone offering that advice knows that he or she is gilding the lily but it doesn’t mean they are valueless.

My life changed for the better in the early 1990s when I was offered the position of editor of Australian Small Business magazine by the management of Federal Publishing.

It forced me to interview the likes of Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Tom Peters, Jay Abraham, Michael Gerber and Sir Richard Branson.

All of these were teachers of business actions that gave me skills I didn’t have before. They also, by virtually hanging out with them, gave me inspiration to be committed to a goal. And then taking the actions so goals become real success stories rather than exciting dreams.

They were inspirational and motivational in different doses of intensity but they all made it clear that if you wanted different output, you had to change the inputs. And the key input to change was you, your focus and your desire to really want change.

Not one of these guys, I can recall, promised that you’d win if you just did what they said but they did say that if you want to win and change, legends of business do leave clues and so their key inspirational/motivational message was to know what you want and go for it.

They goaded you to look for help to build up your competitive advantage or strength zone and use others to deal with your weakness zone activities, where you are never likely to make money/success out of.

Dr Bobby Hoffman makes some decent points about motivational speakers who over-promise and are destined to under-deliver but I suspect it’s an OK idea to read and listen to anyone who has kicked some big goals in their lives because, as I’ve said many times, legends leave clues.

But you will never see them and learn from them if you don’t get inspired and motivated to go looking for them.

Most things in life can be taught but the commitment and the desire of the student can have a big bearing on how good the teacher’s results end up looking. That’s why, as a teacher I used to work on making economics relevant and entertaining to build up the motivation for my students to be interested in all this gobblygook economics that had a big bearing on our lives and happiness.

I reckon you could have a lot worse use of your time than checking out the lessons of Les Brown and Dr Willie Jolley but don’t let them sell you anything you don’t want!

(During this time of economic recession, social unrest, high unemployment and Covid-19 two Australian event organisers decided they wanted to do something positive for the public so they’ve engaged Les Brown and Willie Jolley to deliver a free seminar online tomorrow June 28 www.getmotivatedgetwealthy.com.au)

On May 5, US airlines stocks took off and American Airlines has seen a 54% increase in its share price. Two days before on Saturday May 2, the Oracle of Omaha did a live presentation of his company’s shareholder meeting where he told the world he had dumped all his airline stocks. Airline prices fell for a day or two and since then have been flying high!

This is a life irony that I won’t easily forget. As you can see from my headline, I’ve written something that has been more driven by irony rather than from what is a considered view.

In fact, for me to write and even think — “How could Warren Buffett be so stupid?” — cuts me to the core. However, after years of studying Buffett, I actually reckon he would say: “I was stupid!” Or at least he’d admit that maybe he got it wrong.

Warren has always told us that: “in the business world, the rear-view mirror is always clearer than the windshield”.

Now that airline stock prices have shot up, it makes some people question Warren’s power. One guy said Warren had lost it when he was slow on to the tech boom that brought the FAANG stocks of Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google (Alphabet). But he has around $80billion of Apple stocks and is close to 25% of Berkshire Hathaway’s (BRK) holdings. BRK also has a billion plus in Amazon.

I recently interviewed Paul Black, the CEO and Portfolio Manager for WCM, which is a US fund manager that has two funds on the ASX. I know this because my team brought the fund manager to Australia and WCMQ and WQG have performed well since they were listed.

The US-flag ship fund was up 10% this year, which is extraordinary given the huge sell-off on the stock market, thanks to that damn Coronavirus. Paul told me in an interview (which goes out my Switzer TV Investing programme on Monday) that like me, he sees Warren Buffett as an inspirational influence on how to invest and think about stocks.

He too said he was surprised that Warren would’ve dumped airline stocks when they were trashed and their share prices were so beaten up. As he reminded me, “Warren has told us to be greedy when others are fearful and be fearful when others are greedy”, so this was out of character.

Paul is surprised that Buffett and BRK is sitting on $US128 billion of cash after selling out of its entire stakes in the four largest U.S. carriers, as coronavirus devastated travel demand. The losing investment contributed to the company posting a net loss of close to $US50 billion in the first three months of the year.

But there is another way of looking at this play. What if Buffett thinks another big or even bigger leg down was going to hit and hurt stock markets? If that happens, he has a huge war chest to take to the market.

This week we learnt that “Magellan Financial Group’s co-founder, Chris Mackay has quietly turned extremely bearish on equities, switching almost half the holdings in his $1.6 billion global equities fund to cash.” (AFR)

And Tom Richardson reported that his holdings of cash was only 2.2% in January this year, so he certainly looks to be on a unity ticket with Wazza, at this point in time.

“Mr Mackay defended the 46 per cent cash weighting by using his latest market update to reference academic research that suggested the market was too optimistic over the likelihood of a COVID-19 vaccine,” Richardson told us.

"Business owners, political leaders and the general public appear to be more optimistic, around the world, as are recipients of fiscal payments travelling hundreds of miles to queue for hours for gaming venues reopening," Mackay wrote in his latest market update.

This is a big call by Mackay. I hope he’s wrong on a number of accounts including:

• For the sake of the economic outlook.
• For the sake of future job creation.
• For the sake of my clients’ asset values which have recovered nicely since the rebound started on March 24.
• And for the sake of my own investments!

I don’t like it that I’m at odds with Wazza and Macca but this is an opinion business and uncertainty is always a given.

Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital is a guy whose newsletters are avidly read by the likes of Buffett and Ray Dalio, one of the world’s biggest and richest hedge funds, and a few weeks ago he admitted that his great market knowledge was being tested by the Coronavirus and the lockdowns that have dogged economies and markets.

This is how he summed up his and our predicament as investors:

• The world is an uncertain place.
• It’s more uncertain today than at any other time in our lifetimes.
• Few people know what the future holds much better than others.
• And yet, investing deals entirely with the future, meaning investors can’t avoid making decisions about it.
• Confidence is indispensable in investing, but too much of it can be lethal.
• The bigger the topic (world, economy, markets, currencies and rates), the less possible it is to achieve superior knowledge.
• Even our decisions about smaller things (companies, industries and securities) have to be conditioned on assumptions regarding the bigger things, so they too are uncertain.
• The ability to deal intelligently with uncertainty is one of the most important skills.

That said, he quoted one of my favourite economists, John K. Galbraith, who I asked “what will happen to the economy and stocks” in an interview in 1987 after the stock market had crashed in October of that year. He told me: “That there were those economists who tell you they don’t know and then there are those poor fellows who don’t know they don’t know.”

Howard Marks says he doesn’t know. I don’t know but I gambled the stock market would rebound, though this has come faster than I expected. Chris Joye of Coolabah Capital Investments did know and said so in mid-March when he wrote in the AFR: “When all is said and done, markets will get what they want through signalling what is and is not acceptable. Order will eventually be restored. And this crisis will pass, probably within one or two months. Those that survive will face the investment opportunity of a life-time….”

Warren Buffett and Chris Mackay don’t know what lies ahead and they are gracious enough to say it, but they are clearly betting that we are being too positive on stocks. History says crashes of this kind come with two big legs down, however, this is what Warren has said about history: “If past history was all that is needed to play the game of money, the richest people would be librarians.”

Right now, we are all trying to forecast our future and once again Warren has an experience-created view on those who read the tea leaves and make confident forecasts.

“Forecasts may tell you a great deal about the forecaster; they tell you nothing about the future,” Warren warns.

This guy is never stupid when it comes to stocks, but he can make mistakes. I hope this was purely a mistake because understanding pandemics and related economic closures and lockdowns bring with them a new kind of uncertainty, making their reading difficult for even one of the greatest investors of all time.

Of course, if Wazza hasn’t made a mistake in selling out of US airlines and Chris Mackay is absolutely right in holding 50% cash, then we could be in for some scary times ahead.

For my part, I’ve bought companies over the past few weeks driven by another of Warren’s observations: “Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market.”

That way if I’m wrong in the short term, I will be right in the long term. But of course, I’m hoping I’m right in both the short and the long term.

And in case you haven’t understood me, Warren Buffett could be wrong, but he never would be stupid.

The world is in a battle between health and wealth. From late February, health wisely had the political upper hand worldwide, as the Italian brush with the Coronavirus looked like a sick story line from a Quentin Tarantino movie. But now those concerned about jobs, business survival, economic growth and the wealth it can deliver are asking for a more balanced and less emergency approach to the beating up on the virus.

This week I interviewed one of this country’s most successful entrepreneurs and business growers who is about 38 years old and lives in what seems like the most Coronavirus-scared state in the country — Victoria.

I said to him that as soon as I can jump on a plane for Europe or the USA and not be locked up for 14 days when I arrive, or when I return home, I’m out of here. And I look forward to sipping my first glass of champers waiting for take-off! But my friend wasn’t of the same mindset and the thought of travelling was far from him mind.

This has been the impact of the media blitz that has paid off to give us one of the world’s best records on COVID-19 infections and related death rates. This was backed up by a Government stimulus package and a very positive central bank strategy, which has seen us listed by the Brookings Institute as having one of the three best economic rescue plans in the world!

But now we face two new obstacles. The first is how we open up again. The second is what is the possibility of a bad second-wave of infections that will force us back to lockdown and economic closures?

Let’s look at the German experience. They didn’t beat the virus as well as us but have opened up faster.

Germany began to relax some lockdown measures earlier this month, which allowed bars, restaurants, hair salons and retail stores to reopen their doors. Dw.com tells us that “the nation's tourism industry has received a boost as hotels and vacation homes have been told they can welcome guests once more — under certain conditions and depending on state rules,” the German website explains. “German Foreign Minister Heiko Maas and his counterparts in other European Union states have said that travel restrictions across the bloc could be lifted by mid-June.”

Yep, Europeans are serious about letting tourists loose on the Greek Isles, the south of Italy and other summer holiday haunts that we Aussies generally get stuck into around this time of year. Alas, that won’t be a 2020 memory we will reminisce about one day. So the Gold Coast, the Sunshine Coast, Port Douglas, Lorne, the Barossa and Margaret River will be booked out for the upcoming local holiday seasons.

I know a friend’s Airbnb cottage in the mountains has had three enquiries for the same weekend indicating a cabin-fever populace is desperate to go holidaying, which is great for improving the national psyche but also great for holiday destinations that saw their profits burned with the Christmas holiday’s bushfires.

Be clear on this: we need to take some calculated risks on opening up and getting back to work ASAP or else the 10% economic contraction for 2020 and 10% unemployment forecasts could come to fruition.

What does that mean to those of you reading this, whose job might be safe, whose interest rates are at emergency, historically low levels, and who hasn’t seen their business revenue slashed by 80%, which has turned annual profits into losses? Nothing. But to those who are the opposite of you, getting us back to normal Aussie economic life is crucial. However, as Franklin D. Roosevelt said in the Great Depression of the 1930s: “The only thing to fear is fear itself.”

Because the media has done a great job in scaring the pants off us, which has largely helped us play by the social distancing rules and become addicted to hand sanitizer, we now need the media to start rebuilding faith in the safety of Australia. This means politicians and especially state premiers have to get logical and smart. And if they need guidance from a business that has always been led by the smartest thinkers in the room, then they should get down to their nearest Apple store.

On Thursday, the queue outside was 100 metres long — helped by social distancing’s 1.5 metres (which is three pizza boxes in case you need help with measuring). Everyone in the store, with its huge glass walls, had masks on!

I thought that was a good sign that we were getting smart but then I saw security guards were handing them out as people got on the queue.

As I watched people buzzing around the Apple store, like normal, albeit with blue masks on, I thought if our leaders told us to “mask up, shut up and get on with it”, then we could get back to normal (sans masks) ASAP!

The rules could be simple:

• No mask, no public transport.
• No mask, no access to a shopping centre or shop.
• No mask, no riding in a lift.

Oh yeah, the recently created bush experts on the Coronavirus tell me that masks don’t work but the population of Hong Kong mask up at the drop of a virus hat, so let’s see how they did with the Coronavirus.

Here are the stats:

• Total infections — 1,067
• Total deaths — 4
• Deaths per million of population — 0.5
• Population — 7,491,423

The US deaths per million were 312, the UK 558, France 439, Spain 580 and Brazil 2,066. In countries such as Germany where they are more rule-oriented, the number was 102 and in many Asian countries where they mask up, the results were miles better.

Sure, there are other factors but if we were forced to mask up, shut up from whinging about being told what to do and get on with doing as instructed, then we will see normalcy come back faster than expected.

Importantly, that will not only mean better social outcomes, such as getting to watch footie at the ground if you wear a mask, it will also deliver a great economic dividend.

This week the RBA Governor, Dr Phil Lowe addressed the COVID-19 committee and made it clear that our better health outcome means our potential economic collapse could be less damaging that what was expected a few weeks ago.

However, he also inferred that we need areas such as construction and professional services to see normalcy come ASAP to ensure business investment follows to give us the better growth that some economists are predicting.

As an economist, I know how critical confidence (that translates into spending) is for creating economic growth and jobs. The longer we are kept scared like my entrepreneur mate and his potential customers, the higher the jobless rate will be.

A 10% unemployment rate could leave 1.2 million people without jobs, while a 7% rate would only hit 840,000. And given there were about 600,000 people out of work going into this Coronavirus crash, that’s not a bad result.

If it means I’m forced to mask up, shut up and get on with it, I would do it in a heartbeat! And now we need our leaders, who have seen their popularity rise with their actions to beat the virus, have the guts to tell us to mask up, shut up and get on with it! It will take a pretty gutsy leader to do this. But saving hundreds of thousands of people’s jobs is worth it.

One of my great young staff members wrote a piece pondering “I’m 23 and I’ve lived through three “once in a lifetime” economic collapses” and how come? It comes as she, like a lot of new potential investors, start looking at the stock market, which is a good thing, but it can be a bad thing.

I loved her story as it revealed what young people think of the crazy world we’ve created for them, which over time they will inevitably change. I had to pull editorial rank on her when she did her best to work out why these collapses happened without accessing experts and doing the hard research, but as a gift I said I’d have a crack at it.

I not only taught the theory of macroeconomics at the University of New South Wales between 1979 and 1992 but I have been an economics commentator for The Daily Telegraph, Sun-Herald, The Australian and for a number of radio stations, as well as hosting Talking Business on Qantas for 10 years before taking on the SWITZER program on the Sky News Business Channel for over a decade.

I hate crashes because I care about my clients’ wealth and have never played the hedge fund manager who shorts the stock market ahead of a crash. Maybe I will do that next time, if I can see it coming. That said, crashes have been good for me, my brand and success.

My media career was born out of the 1987 crash, which saw me become Triple M’s business and political editor. The dotcom crash did not really hurt Australia but explaining it all kept me busy and relevant.

The GFC turned my once-a-week TV show into a weekly program and the Coronavirus crash has escalated the media demands upon my business’s services.

But let’s get to why the three crashes?

Sophia saw the collapses as September 11, the GFC and the current collapse, but I explained the bombing of the Twin Towers happened with the crash of some of the most over-hyped tech businesses of all time: the dotcom crash.

S&P 500 Crashes

Investopedia saw the dotcom crash or bubble as the crash that “saw the Nasdaq index, which had risen five-fold between 1995 and 2000, tumble from a peak of 5,048.62 on March 10, 2000, to 1,139.90 on Oct 4, 2002, a 76.81% fall. By the end of 2001, most dotcom stocks had gone bust.”

September 11 was a bad experience for Wall Street as it was coping with the fallout of the dotcom crash and “on the first day of NYSE trading after 9/11, the market fell 684 points, a 7.1% decline, setting a record at the time for the biggest loss in exchange history for one trading day (this has since been eclipsed by the market reaction during the global coronavirus pandemic). At the close of trading that Friday, ending a week that saw the biggest losses in NYSE history, the Dow Jones Index was down 1,370 points or 14%. The S&P lost 11.6% for the week.

In a technical sense 9/11 was a correction not a crash but the dotcom crash of 2000 took 38% off the S&P 500, the 2008 GFC took 50% and the 2020 Coronavirus shaved 34% off the Index taking them into bear market territory.

So, why are we so crash-prone nowadays? Well, the answer is we’re not.

This is the history of bull markets:

• The pre-Coronavirus U.S. bull market was into its 12th year & is up 360%.
• Average bull markets last about 9 years and rise around 480%.
• The 1980s bull market was 12.8 years and rose 845%.
• The 1990s bull market went for 12.9 years and rose 816%.
• And the longest was 15.1 years in the 1950s and put on 935%.

The 12 year milestone made me suspicious about the bull market in 2020 but record low interest rates made me cut it some slack, though I was worried about 2021. This would’ve been the first year of a newly elected President and it’s historically the worst year for a stock market. Against that, the US stock market had not risen by anything like 800% plus that we’ve seen with other recent bull markets.

And then there was this Citi Bear Market Checklist which virtually said: “Don’t worry about a stock market crash…”

Citi Bear Market Checklist

On the left-hand-side, are the indicators the Citi team look at to pick a pending stock market crash and the three columns spotlight the readings in 2000 with the dotcom crash, late 2007 with the GFC and the time in late 2019, when the only Corona word was for that unfortunately-named but delightful beer!

Reading the chart, there were 17.5 indicators screaming to investors to get out of stocks. In 2007, 13/18 were negative and we did not know that the debt ratings agencies had mis-rated CDOs, which was the trigger for GFC crash. And then 2020 the negative readings were 4/18!

And then along came that damn Coronavirus and the rest is history, as the old but relevant cliché goes.

The history of stock market crashes has a common thread that something crazy and excessive seems OK for a time before, as Warren Buffett, has said: “ It's only when the tide goes out that you learn who's been swimming naked.”

The dotcom bust was linked to silly valuations for tech-companies as the world tried to imagine the world we live in today but the investors who were really speculators underestimated how long it would take for today to arrive.

The GFC was triggered by silly lending practices like the so-called NINJA loans given to low income people for social rather than economic reasons. NINJA loans?

These were for those with No Income, No Jobs and no Assets.

Also, as I said, the debt ratings agencies weren’t accurate in their assessment of the quality of the assets underpinning the collateral debt obligations or CDOs and it brought down the once revered Lehman Brothers.

There seems to be a suicide cycle that starts out of the ashes of the most recent crash, which then gives birth to a new up-cycle or bull market, that occurs in company with economic growth, asset price booms, inflation, higher wages and rising interest rates, which ultimately is the source of the next crash.

This Coronavirus crash was different as there was not surging growth, rising inflation and spiking interest rates, though there was an asset price boom starring property and stocks.

Maybe 2021 was going to be the year that brought growth, inflation and higher interest rates but that potential economic script was scrapped when the Coronavirus came to town.

That said, the respected and very credible chief economist at Morgan’s, Michael Knox says a rapid economic recovery begins in the third quarter, which could make this shortest recession and stock market crash ever.

And backing him up was Scott Wren, the senior global market strategist for Wells Fargo Investment Institute, who told CNBC this week that the US will come out of recession by the end of June!

If these guys aren’t smoking something it would rule out another big leg down for stocks and we’d have to start looking for the next crash, which if history can be trusted is at least eight years off - but I will be looking for it even before then.