Topic: How To Invest

What is Pat’s commentary for the week of March 17, 2020

Article Excerpt

The human and economic damage from Covid-19 so far is minor, compared to what may happen in the coming weeks and months. The stock-market drop to date partly reflects investor guesswork on that future damage may be. Investors are taking their cue from published predictions about the great damage still to come. These predictions come from health experts who are working with data from a variety of official and anecdotal sources, private and public, from around the world. This flood of information, moving swiftly from one source to another, no doubt reflects a lot of differences of opinion, misunderstandings and errors. Even the most highly qualified predictions may be optimistic, pessimistic, or somewhere in between. My guess is that the most highly publicized Covid-19 disaster predictions are, like most disaster predictions, overly pessimistic. You can blame this on human nature. In times like this, the media tend to zero in on memorable or even extreme predictions, rather than the middle-of-the-road variety. This tendency…