20 THENEWYORKER,APRIL20, 2020
As in epidemiology, the basis of the financial markets is numbers.
DEPT.OFFINANCE
THE PRICE OF A PANDEMIC
Pain and profit on Wall Street.BY NICK PAUMGARTEN
ILLUSTRATION BY BEN WISEMAN
T
he investor who calls himself the
Australian headed out for a walk
on his farm in the Alps of New South
Wales, three hundred miles south of Syd-
ney. This was a morning in late March.
He’d been holed up there for a month
with his wife and three kids, plus two
portable oxygen units and a store of hy-
droxychloroquine. “But my intention is
not to get it,” he said, of covid-19. “I
don’t plan to see anyone until October.”
He was talking on a cell phone. You could
hear the caw of crows in the background,
and the luffing of the wind. “I only see
four other people in the valley. If I need
to kill them, I will.” One assumed, from
the way he laughed, that this was a joke.
The Australian, who spoke on the
condition that his name not be used, is
a voluble redhead just shy of fifty. “Bil-
lions dude looks like me,” he wrote, in a
WhatsApp message accompanied by a
pair of photos. He did indeed resemble
Damian Lewis, the actor who plays a
hedge-fund magnate in the Showtime
series “Billions.” “He stole my look.”
Reared in Sydney, the Australian moved
to New York in 1994, when he turned
twenty-two, to trade commodities at
Goldman Sachs. At JPMorgan, he and
a couple of his countrymen—known as
the Aussie mafia—earned the firm hun-
dreds of millions in profits during the
early months of the financial crisis, in- In 2015, he moved to Singapore.
Proximity to China, a bearish disposi-
tion, and an interest in the history of vir-
ulent diseases led him to pay special at-
tention to the effects that recent outbreaks
had had on financial markets. SARS, H1N1,
Ebola. Last October, he listened to an
audiobook by the Hardcore History pod-
caster, Dan Carlin, called “The End Is
Always Near.” “So I had pandemics and
plagues in my head,” the Australian said.
“In December, I started seeing the first
articles about this wet-market thing going
on in China, and then in early January
there was a lot on Twitter about the shit
in Wuhan.” He was in Switzerland on a
ski holiday with his family, and he bought
all the surgical masks and gloves he could
find. On the flight back to Australia, he
and his wife wore some, to the bewilder-
ment of other passengers.
He quickly put some money to work.
He bought a big stake in Alpha Pro Tech,
one of the few North American manu-
facturers of N95 surgical masks, with the
expectation that when the virus made it
across the Pacific the company would
get government contracts to produce
more. The stock was trading at about
three dollars and fifty cents a share, and
so, for cents on the dollar, he bought op-
tions to purchase the shares at a future
date for ten dollars: he was betting that
it would go up much more than that. By
the end of February, the stock was trad-
ing at twenty-five dollars a share. He
shorted oil and, as a proxy for oil, the
Canadian dollar. (That is, he bet against
both.) Finally, he shorted U.S. equities.
“You don’t know anyone who has made
as much money out of this as I have,” he
said over the phone. No argument here.
He wouldn’t specify an amount, but reck-
oned that he was up almost two thou-
sand per cent on the year.
Emboldened by vindication, the Aus-
tralian, walking through the countryside,
laid out his prognosis for the United States
and the world. America needed to “rip
off the Band-Aid,” he said. The federal
government should close the borders,
shut off all international commerce, de-
clare martial law, deploy the military to
build field hospitals and isolation wards,
and arrest or even fire on anyone who
didn’t abide by a stay-in-place protocol.
(“In 1918, in San Francisco, a cop shot
someone in broad daylight for being out-
side without a face mask, and the cop