Viral investing

What'll the world be like one year from now? Don't bet on worst-case scenarios to come true, either in your personal lives or your savings and investments. Of course, things will get worse before they stabilise and then get better. However, the basics of the world will not change. Look at similar events in the past. During 1918-19, a great influenza epidemic swept the world. About 5 crore people died worldwide. India was the worst hit, with about 1.8 crore dead. That was about 5 per cent of the population at the time. That disease was far worse than COVID-19 is, and medical science was primitive compared to today. On top of that, the First World War (1914-18) had just ended. And yet despite all that, the years after that were a great expansion of economic activity and prosperity. So much so that the exuberance got overdone and resulted in the crash of 1929 and the ensuing depression. Some of us may have heard grandparents and great-grandparents talk about it. However, the fact remains that the impact of the medical disaster, even such a severe one, was short-lived. Life goes on. Billions of people live their daily lives - they work; they eat; they buy things. Even at this stage, we would hazard a guess that life will change less than we think it will. Humanity and the worl

This article was originally published on May 14, 2020.