The 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 Sydney. 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 hydroxychloroquine. “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. “Billions 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 hundreds of millions in profits during the early months of the financial crisis, in 2008. In 2015, he moved to Singapore. Proximity to China, a bearish disposition, and an interest in the history of virulent diseases led him to pay special attention 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 podcaster, 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 bewilderment 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 manufacturers 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 options 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 trading 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 reckoned that he was up almost two thousand per cent on the year.

Emboldened by vindication, the Australian, 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, declare 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 outside without a face mask, and the cop was celebrated for it!”) Or perhaps the government should reward each citizen who strictly observed the quarantine with fifty thousand dollars. “The virus would burn out after four weeks,” he said. The U.S. had all the food and water and fuel it would need to survive months, if not years, of total isolation from the world. “If you don’t trade with China, they’re screwed,” he said. “You’d win this war. Let the rest of the world burn.” The problem, he said, was that, perhaps more now than ever, Americans lack what he called “social cohesion,” and thus the collective will, to commit to such a path. “Plus, you have guns. Lots of guns. And all the base materials for your drugs, like ninety-seven per cent, come from China.” He predicted that any less stringent measures—the slow removal of the Band-Aid that we are experiencing now—would result in social unrest bordering on civil war, and the decimation of our medical ranks. “So suddenly everyone who’s seen ‘House’ would be a doctor,” he said. Politically, the Australian considered himself well right of center, yet he thought it ridiculous that the United States doesn’t have nationalized health care. He predicted the cancellation of the Presidential election, or Donald Trump’s resignation, or the creation of an emergency leadership council, to which, throughout the conversation, he nominated Generals Mattis and Petraeus, Bill Gates, and Gary Cohn, for whom the Australian had worked at Goldman Sachs. “You could have either four weeks of pain and a future boom or years of this rolling bullshit and a depression. But people are just selfish. They’re not thinking. They’re morons.”

It was one such moron, an old friend of mine, who had introduced me to the Australian. They’d overlapped at Goldman Sachs. I’d been eavesdropping for a week on the friend’s WhatsApp conversation with dozens of his acquaintances and colleagues (he called them the Fokkers, for an acronym involving his name), all of them men, most of them expensively educated financial professionals, some of them very rich, a few with connections in high places. The general disposition of the participants, with exceptions, was the opposite of the Australian’s. Between memes, they expressed the belief, with a conviction that occasionally tipped into stridency or mockery, that the media, the modellers, and the markets were overreacting to the threat of the coronavirus—that it was little more than another flu, and that effectively shutting down the economy to prevent, or at least slow, the spread of the virus would turn out to be far more harmful, in the long run, than the virus itself. “The biggest own goal in memory,” one Fokker wrote.

“Suicide due to innumeracy,” another noted.

They constituted a sample of the-cure-is-worse-than-the-disease segment of the population, and, on the day of my conversation with the Australian, President Trump appeared to be steering hard their way. Defying the dire prognostications and pleadings of the medical establishment, Trump threw out there that businesses would soon reopen and that economic activity might kick in again by Easter. (Oh, well.) In the next few days, it was perhaps this prospect, as well as the unprecedentedly large two-trillion-dollar stimulus package passed in the Senate, that caused the stock market to rally, after one of the most precipitate collapses in its history. (As a general rule, despite the assertions of the financial media, it is difficult to say with any certainty which relevant facts or sentiments may make the market indices go up or down on any given day.) On March 26th, when the Labor Department reported that a record 3.3 million Americans had filed jobless claims the previous week—as if every man, woman, and child in Philadelphia and Phoenix suddenly joined the breadline—both the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S. & P. 500 shot up more than six per cent. The crosswinds were fierce.