Better call Bartho: Your must-read man in a financial meltdown
AS51 GP GO. GRR GO. MOV GO. These are not typos they are computer commands familiar to many workers in the financial world and its watchers, including journalists.
Plugging those commands into a Bloomberg terminal produces instant, live and incredibly rich information about markets here and around the world. I learned codes like these by heart in my five years as national business editor for The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald as I spent a lot of time at the Bloomberg terminal tucked in an alcove that doubles as a mail room.
Its value is belied by its modest address and I found myself back at its double monitors frequently this week as Donald Trump unleashed daily mayhem on the markets.
The muscle memory was there for the old go-to commands, but I had certainly never seen days like these.
I was still relatively new at the Australian Financial Review during the global financial crisis and the subsequent property meltdown. I remember expressing amazement to the great Barrie Dunstan that another big company had gone down, and he replied in his usual friendly way: “Yes, that’s what happens.”
The Bloomberg machine in The Age newsroom.
Barrie, having started on The Argus, had seen a few of these market conniptions. Still, I wonder what he would’ve made of Trump’s latest gambit.
This week I had so many competing thoughts. If Trump crashes economies, central banks will want to cut rates right? This was certainly a logic that Treasurer Jim Chalmers was keen to peddle.
But what if Trump’s tariffs increase inflation, which way will they jump? Reserve Bank governor Michele Bullock is suggesting she’s not so sure.
Would Australian inflation naturally follow America’s upwards or will we instead face a deluge of deflationary cheap consumer goods?
Energy stocks tanked, anticipating slower demand, so will fuel get cheaper or will a falling Australian dollar eat those gains?
The Age’s Bloomberg terminal, on the right, in its alcove.
Speaking of the dollar, could its fall then boost the Australian dollar price of commodities like iron ore and help overcome falling demand from our buyers, in particular, China? China too would surely look to stimulate its economy anyway right? Maybe we even get a double bite with higher demand and higher Australian dollar income for the big miners.
Then there were bonds; in normal times (remember those?) investors flee volatility and head to the relative safety of US 10-year Treasury bonds.
But here was Stephen Bartholomeusz telling me on our website – as I enjoyed an otherwise comforting lunch of leftover Syrian chicken my wife had made for my birthday this week – that investors were running the other way.
His column arrives at lunchtime every weekday like clockwork, hitting The Age’s midday online edition. The business team works hard to have it ready and our homepage editors are waiting. We can see you also enjoy reading his thoughts over your lunch.
That piece, incidentally, also had an answer to my question about central banks, with Bartho (as he is universally known) tipping the American Federal Reserve will decide a recession is a lesser evil than runaway inflation.
As I’m writing this, his Thursday column on “Mad king” Trump is by far our best read story on the site. It’s a great piece explaining how so many warning signs were flashing that Trump couldn’t ignore them.
These are just the most recent examples of Bartho being right on the pulse of the global financial conversation. Want to know why the global financial game of pick-up sticks moved? Better call Bartho. So I did.
“This is the biggest shock in my lifetime,” he told me, noting that he’d covered the 1987 market crash for The Age.
He has also written his way through the dotcom crunch and the GFC. But right now, this is the worst he’s seen.
Regular readers of his columns will know he’s no fan of Trump’s “logic” around tariffs and trade. I asked him what those readers tell him, and he says what strikes him about the messages he receives, and the online comments on his columns (yes he reads them), is how engaged and knowledgeable the audience is about what’s happening.
Bartho is, of course, just one part of the excellent teams that have brought you news and insights with speed and depth across the riotous events of the past few weeks.
In business for example, our extremely versatile and hard-working deputy editor Clancy Yeates has both marshalled reporting and written some good pieces himself.
Peter Hartcher has provided superbly sourced and biting geopolitical analysis. This piece was published, updated, and published again due to Trump’s volte-face. It’s a testament to Hartcher’s skill that his central thesis held throughout.
Our foreign correspondents Michael Koziol in America, Lisa Visentin in Asia and Rob Harris in Europe have sniffed out the news as well as providing excellent analysis.
A great example is Koziol’s analysis, written in the immediate fallout of “Liberation Day” calling out the tariffs as a hoax. It was quick, it was sharp, it was right.
From Canberra and on the campaign trail David Crowe, Shane Wright and Millie Muroi have broken news on the local fallout, and pressed our leaders throughout.
Of course much of all this work is shared through our daily blogs, which bring you the latest news fast, from when you log on in the morning until well into the evening. And there are two daily business newsletters and a weekly money newsletter which I’d urge you to sign up to if you want to keep up with a very fast news cycle. [You can sign up here to receive our Business Briefing newsletter every weekday morning, here for our afternoon Market Recap, and here for our Real Money email, delivered on Sunday mornings.]
This is a big moment, and we’ve responded accordingly. It’s a worrying time and I hope our coverage is helping you know and understand what’s happening, and perhaps even get a sense of what might happen next – although predicting Trump’s next move is near impossible. It’s this complexity and the stakes involved that fire someone like Bartho.
“That’s why it’s all so fascinating,” Bartho told me. “If it was simple, it wouldn’t be so much fun to write about.”
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