Owen Raskovich

And we also were impacted, although to a much lesser extent, by the SARS outbreak.

So both of these viruses and both of these, I guess, pandemics were global issues and they were in the 2000s.

So the SARS in the early 2000s and the swine flu or H1N1 in the late 2000s, 2009, 2010.

I've provided links in the show notes so you can get an understanding of, I guess, those outbreaks and how we handled them.

and some of the learnings and some of the things that we've installed in the Australian government and elsewhere to kind of preempt the next outbreak, such as this one.

The other thing that I really wanted to address here is that obviously this is a tragedy.

We'll be talking about investing in uncertain environments.

I am in no way making light of what is by far the most important thing, which is human life and human existence.

So it doesn't matter to me if someone is Australian, Italian, Chinese, white, black.

Domestic or foreign, the loss of human life is tragic.

So even though I'll be talking about this from an investor's perspective and how we can deal with that from a personal finance point of view, which is where my expertise lies, it is obviously tragic and I do not mean to make light of it in any way.

Okay, so once again, please refer to the show notes if you want more information on that.

Now I'm going to get to the finance part and how we as investors can prepare ourselves and what we've seen so far and I can kind of break down some of the reasons why we're seeing the things that we're seeing.

So let's first talk about, I guess, China because China made the headlines with this virus because it's believed that that's where the virus started.

Now, this is important because China is obviously one of the economic superpowers in the world.

You know this because almost everything that you buy from the shops says made in China on the back, right?

But this is a really recent thing in terms of the evolution of capital markets.

So when the SARS virus broke out recently,

That was in the early 2000s.

And at the time, China accounted for only about 4%.