But first, let’s recall some warnings about passive investing:

– Index funds are Marxist or communist

– Or socialist

– Passive investing is “devouring capitalism”

– It has reached a “mania”

– The passive boom is creating “frightening” risk for markets

– Passive investing is “lobotomized investing”

– Indexing represents a danger to the economy

– Your love of index funds is terrible for our economy

– They are a bubble waiting to burst

– Passive investing poses a systemic risk

But a funny thing happened on the way to this dangerous, systemic, Marxist bubble:

Nothing.

If ever there was a situation where the critics have told us passive was destined to fail, this should be it: the fastest bear market on record. A market externality caused by the coronavirus pandemic has sent volatility to swing wildly as markets have fallen the most since the financial crisis of 2008-’09. For investors younger than 40, this month probably saw the worst day of their investing lives. The Dow Jones Industrial Average now is about 30% lower than its record high set a little more than four weeks ago.

If ever there was an opportunity for active investing to shine, this is it.

But that’s not what we have seen. The panic is emanating from the great minds on Wall Street, not the plodders on Main Street. Perhaps the most intriguing indicator of this is found in the vehicles that professionals use versus those preferred by individual investors.

Consider the three largest S&P 500 Index funds in the world: State Street’s SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust or Spyder (SPY), Blackrock’s iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) and Vanguard’s S&P 500 ETF (VOO). State Street’s Spyder is arguably the choice of professionals; it was the first major index ETF and the most liquid. BlackRock and Vanguard’s offerings are preferred by registered investment advisers and individual investors. Note these all hold the exact same thing; they are simply in different ETF wrappers.

As of last week, when the sell-off began to accelerate, BlackRock and Vanguard customers were net buyers every single day. By the end of the week, State Street’s customers turned into sellers. (We should get updated data on last week from all three fund managers later this week.)

In other words, as the sell-off progressed, Wall Street pros panicked and sold while moms and pops stayed calm and bought. Some of this is attributable to different timelines between investors and traders, or between short-term and long-term. But one can’t help but think that some of this is explained by psychology: The professionals are the ones whose bonuses and perhaps even their jobs are on the line. Retail investors looked to take advantage of a price drop.

But we can guess how this will develop, based on the latest data from Vanguard Group. According to the firm’s most recent measures of money flows, every single day of February and the first week of March all saw a net gain for equities. (Data for the week of March 9 was not available when I wrote this.)

This is very similar to what former Vanguard chairman and chief executive officer William McNabb observed during the financial crisis in 2008-’09: The pros sold and the amateurs bought.

Retail investors are the dumb money? I don’t think so.

Most investment assets today are still managed actively. However, as we noted in 2017, the active part of the money-management industry is still being downsized – or more correctly, right-sized. The active management world still has not yet come to grips with the sea change that followed the financial crisis.

Passive indexing and ETFs have provided a counterweight to the active traders who seem to be panic selling. Remember that the next time someone warns you of the dangers of passive investing.

– – –

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Ritholtz is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management, and was previously chief market strategist at Maxim Group. He is the author of “Bailout Nation.”

The question is: can we still make it in time to comply by May? First of all, compliance is not a one-off exercise, it is about building a capability and achieving continuous improvement. The PDPA wants you to be in control of your personal data and increase your level of assurance. Therefore, if by May you have at least identified the main risks, introduced a couple of measures and come up with a proper implementation plan, you have a road to follow.

In the following sections we focus on two main actions to take towards May: “Prioritize your risks” and “achieve quick wins”.

Prioritise based on risks

The very first step is to understand what personal data you process, why, how and where. Towards this end, work closely with your client facing teams and internal functions. Be sure to distinguish between structured and unstructured data. Often unstructured data is harder to manage and control.

The cornerstone of any PDPA compliance project is the records of processing activities in support of Section 39. Make sure the records represent the combined understanding of your business, IT and legal people. It is important to identify for which processing activities you process (sensitive) personal data, for which purpose and the lawful basis.

Next step is to visualise the records into high level data flows which should be used to support any discussions with management or the regulator. In parallel, you should make a list of systems and applications supporting processing activities and identify transfers to third countries. By the way, understanding the data collection points will enable you to know where a privacy notices should be added.

Then, identify for each processing activity the risks for non-compliance to your organisation and the risks to rights and freedoms of data subjects. Perform a threshold assessment based on well accepted criteria used in the EU such as whether the activity may result in profiling or monitoring, whether it is easy to merge data sets, whether you are processing on a large scale, etc. This will allow you to distinguish between high, medium or low risk processing activities.

For the high risk activities, perform a Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA). When doing so, analyze which data protection principles maybe be impacted. We recommend to also take into consideration the rights of the data subject. The key questions are “how bad would it be if something happens?” and “how likely is this to happen?”

Now you can determine whether the level of risk is acceptable for your organization. However, consider that some risks to the rights and freedoms of data subjects should not be accepted. In this context, determine which controls could mitigate which risk. Controls may modify the likelihood, the impact, or both. There are four typical types of controls to be considered: preventive, detective, repressive and corrective.

Achieve quick wins

There may not be enough time to mitigate all risks by May. Nevertheless, you should initiate some quick wins and focus on short term pragmatic actions: Remove unused data, determine lawful basis of your processing activities, update your contract templates and draft key policies and notices.

Removing personal data you don’t need equals to removing the risk that something may happen to it. Just imagine how many years of activities have accumulated personal data across your systems. However, remember that the PDPA is not absolute and data retention requirements from other legal obligations may apply.

Managing consent is resource intensive and relying on legitimate basis in some cases is a black box. Try to rely as much as possible on legal obligation and performance of a contract to have a clear-cut answer to “can we process this personal data?”

Sooner or later you will need to review all your contracts with third parties. But this is a project on its own and may take months. At the very least you should identify all types of contracts you have and update the templates so that it includes the necessary legal language. When doing so be sure to have a placeholder to cover the instruction given from controller to processor and consider having a clause allowing you to audit the processor when relying on its services as a controller.

Lastly, draft your privacy policy in a way that is easy to digest, create the supporting procedures for example to handle data subject requests or report personal data breaches. Also make sure clear notices are created and available at the relevant personal data collection points. Data subjects have the right to know what personal data you collect, what it will be used for, etc.

Conclusion

Don’t try to do everything by May. Be smart, and focus on the real risks while creating some success stories to gain credibility from your teams. After May you can continue your efforts to increase your level of assurance, operationalize your practices and monitor compliance.

Alexander Cespedes is Director, Risk Advisory, Deloitte Thailand

Is the emergency happening tonight? Is it happening now? Your answers to those questions will depend on how many pallets of toilet paper you currently have in your pantry. When apocalypses seem imminent, rolls of toilet paper unspool into the yardage by which Americans measure panic. We can imagine no scenario worse than the world ending while our pants are around our ankles.

On Thursday, Walmart, Target and Amazon’s online marketplaces were all out of stock, or close to it, and brick-and-mortar stores set limits of packs per customer until they ran out, too. An Australian newspaper printed eight extra blank pages, advertised as “emergency toilet roll.”

So, when you went to the store, did you buy all the toilet paper? Did you shove 36 megarolls into your cart, and then smush in 36 more, because your primary concern, in all of this mess, was saving your own butt?

Or, did you stand in the aisle and do the math: How much toilet tissue is already in your linen closet, times the number of butts living in your house, divided by how long you think this apocalypse will last.

Did you also factor in the number of butts (and hands, and hearts, and lungs) in your town, your state, your time zone? Was your math simple, or was it made complex by a sincere belief that, just as public health depends on herd immunity, public sanity depends on herd empathy – meaning, you acknowledge everyone else’s rear end is also on the line?

My job is to write about gender, and I’ve spent days trying to think of what that might mean in a pandemic. Men, dying at higher rates than women, at least in early reports from China? Women, bearing the brunt of extra child care and housework caused by closings, not to mention being the front lines of nursing and home health care? Men, who, at a rate of 69 percent, apparently do not regularly wash their hands in public bathrooms? The long social history that apparently led to this hand-washing gap, with century-old ad campaigns imploring women to be “modern health crusaders”?

If you want to get really deep into the most woo-woo of gender stereotypes: on Wednesday you could have watched President Donald Trump talk about using “tough measures,” “vigilance” and “authority” to “defeat” the virus. And then you could watch former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson talk about the “infinite love” necessary for “healing” the world of the virus. She ended her guided meditation by staring into the camera and whispering, “Go wash your hands.” Maybe there’s something to be said about the language of combat versus the language of cooperation – how they reflect masculine and feminine tropes and whether one is better suited than the other to the kind of war we’re now in.

In truth, though, there is only one division that matters in a pandemic, and it is not gender.

It is whether you believe you deserve to hoard all the toilet paper.

Hoarding all the toilet paper means one of two things: One, you think you are genuinely more worthy of comfort, and if other people wanted to be comfortable then they should have bought all the toilet paper first. Two, it never even occurred to you that, if you buy everything, someone else is going to come in – someone who had a different work schedule, or was waiting to get paid – and they will not be able to buy anything.

The medical historian Frank Snowden gave an interview to the New Yorker recently about pandemics and epidemics and what they all mean for societies. “Epidemics are a category of disease that seem to hold up the mirror to human beings as to who we really are,” he told the magazine. “They show the moral relationships that we have toward each other as people.”

We are in the very early stages of learning how those moral relationships will be revealed in the age of coronavirus. We’re still in the double-take period, the that’s-a-good-question period. Disneyland only just closed. The Kennedy Center only just closed. The NBA only just suspended its season. Things could get so much weirder and more surreal, as we fight to put aside our own comfort and think of the older, the sicker, the weaker among us. The time of making calculations are just beginning. Will your math be simple, or complex?

We are not in a state of emergency if you are down to your last three rolls of toilet paper. We are in a state of emergency if you have 96 rolls, and some people have no rolls, and you don’t care.

Monica Hesse is a columnist for The Washington Post’s Style section and author of “American Fire.”

America is shutting down at lightning speed as schools and businesses instruct people to go home and wait the coronavirus out. That is having a massive ripple effect on the economy as people curtail spending on about everything but toilet paper, pasta and hand sanitizer.

The pace at which all of this is happening is unprecedented. In 2008, it took 274 days for the stock market to enter the dreaded “bear market” territory. It took just 24 days to enter a bear market now. JPMorgan just changed its forecast to predict a recession in the first half of the year (a recession is two quarters of negative growth).

Economists and big Wall Street investors nearly all agree the nation has to do whatever it takes to get the health crisis under control, even if that means putting the economy into a recession. The hope was that a downturn would be short-lived. Until only a few days ago, most economists were talking about a “V” or “U” shaped situation with a quick drop this spring that would be followed by a massive rebound this summer as Americans cooped up at home do a mass rush back into “normal” life.

But now there is real concern this will look more like a “L” where stocks tank, the economy tanks and it is a slow and painful recovery. In other words, even if the health crisis is tamed, the economic crisis could last longer.

Much of this hinges on how long the economy has to be in timeout mode – a few weeks or a few months. As a small-business owner in Michigan, who did not want to be named for fear of worrying his customers, said by text: “My sales are down by half. I won’t survive three months like this.”

The same is true for workers. Layoffs have already started across the country in businesses as diverse as ports, hotels and bakeries. Many people can eek by for a few weeks, especially with some government and nonprofit aid to expand unemployment benefits, sick pay and food stamps, but it is a different story if the situation lasts for months. People start missing credit card, car and home payments because the government aid typically is not as much as they were making before. Then they start losing their car or home.

“The U.S. economy is in a tailspin,” writes economist Claudia Sahm on her blog. “This month and in the months to come, the incomes of families across the country will fall, making it impossible for some to make ends meet. As a result, spending will fall, hitting the bottom line hard at restaurants, car dealerships, construction companies, and many more.”

Fears about the economic impact heightened Friday after Anthony Fauci, head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” that it could take “eight weeks or more” of shutdowns and working from home to get covid-19 controlled.

What makes the economic situation so complicated is that uncertainty will remain high until the health situation is under control. So the usual playbook of sending Americans money or cutting their taxes or lowering their borrowing costs does not help if they literally cannot – or do not want – to leave their homes.

On top of that, the list of industries that need help is growing rapidly, an eerily reminiscent situation of 2008. Initially the coronavirus was mainly hurting the travel sector – airlines, hotels and cruise lines – and West Coast shipping and ports that are tied heavily to China. But now the pain is being felt across most of the service sector, which accounts for over 110 million jobs, excluding health care.

“Consumption is going to fall like a stone in March. You aren’t going to get that back,” said Constance Hunter, chief economist at KPMG. She is now predicting a 30 percent drop in consumption this month alone, a devastating blow for restaurants, event venues and more.

“You need to help the individuals and businesses most severely impacted. Otherwise it won’t be a V-shaped impact with a bounce back,” Hunter said.

A third blow is the oil price war Saudi Arabia and Russia launched over the weekend. Oil is now trading at barely above $30 a barrel, a level most U.S. firms cannot survive on for long. Massive layoffs are likely in energy in the coming weeks, another blow that might not bounce back, even if coronavirus ultimately goes away.

Policymakers are facing an almost whack-a-mole situation as they try to figure out which businesses and Americans are in the most need of support. So much of the economy is interconnected. If energy flounders, manufacturing and business investment are almost certain to sink with it, akin to what happened in 2015 and early 2016. Small business owners and gig workers are likely to be slow to go out to eat again or do expensive travel as they struggle to rebuild their bank accounts after coronavirus.

“It is worth remembering that in the early days of the housing market downturn, many of us thought that the problems would be limited to the subprime mortgage market,” said Louise Sheiner, policy director for the Hutchins Center on Fiscal and Monetary Policy, in a blog post. “We were very wrong.”

Among economists and Wall Street, the consensus is that U.S. leaders were too slow to respond in 2008 and too stingy with their initial aid. There was too much focus on one part of the market instead of realizing how rapid the spillover would be to the wider economy. No one wants a repeat of 2008.

Saudi Arabia demanded that Russia share in a proposed reduction of a further 1.5 million barrels a day, insisting that OPEC wouldn’t reduce supply without the support of non-members. Russia demurred. Maybe Vladimir Putin just didn’t like being told what to do by a 34-year-old prince who’s run his country for about as many months and his older brother who’s been energy minister for just half a year.

What’s become clear is that by making any OPEC output cut dependent on the participation of non-OPEC allies, the group effectively cemented Russia’s full control over the whole process of supply management, as I warned more than a year ago. This isn’t the first time OPEC+, which controls almost half of the world’s oil production, has been an uneasy partnership, but it is by far the most damaging. The partnership remains on life-support.

But this meeting was not just about making a further output cut. It was also meant to ratify an extension of the current agreement between the 20 nations to remove as much as 2.1 million barrels a day of oil from the market. That deal, reached in December, expires at the end of this month, leaving members free to pump as much as they wish from April 1.

And that’s just what Saudi Arabia is gearing up to do. State-owned oil monopoly Saudi Aramco, delayed setting official selling prices for April after the meeting collapsed. When it published them on Saturday, it slashed its flagship Arab Light crude by the most in 20 years, signaling that it may try to push as many barrels into the market as possible.

Bad as they are, things may not be quite as bad as some fear. Don’t expect the full volume of OPEC+ cuts to return immediately and swamp the market. Most members are already pumping at, or close to, capacity. Aside from Saudi Arabia, which could add more than 1 million barrels very quickly, the only other countries with the ability to boost output by more than 100,000 barrels a day are the United Arab Emirates and Russia.

Russia didn’t reject further output cuts just because its oil companies are reluctant to pump a bit less out of the ground. After all, they haven’t exactly stuck to their commitments so far, and at the last meeting they even secured an exemption for condensates – volumes of light oil extracted from gas fields – which is one of the areas of growth in Russian output. Had they wanted to do so, there was plenty of room for Russia to accept an output cut and implement it only in part, if at all.

One reason for refusing to play ball may be disagreement over how best to deal with a sudden sharp, but temporary, drop in oil demand. By allowing oil prices to fall, the Russians may be hoping to spur demand. It’s difficult to see that having much impact on consumption, though, when factories are closed, airlines are slashing flights and roads are emptying. Cheap oil won’t ease fears of the covid-19 virus.

But it may encourage countries like China and India to build up their strategic stockpiles. Both are creating buffers along similar lines to the U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve to protect themselves from any future supply disruptions. China already seems to be pouring vast amounts of crude into storage tanks and underground caverns.

Flows of crude from the Persian Gulf nations are down from their record October level, but they’re still pretty much on trend with shipments since the start of 2017. Volumes from West Africa are holding up, too. And amid the collapse in its oil consumption, China has emerged as the biggest buyer of crude from the Kurdish region of Iraq. It took four out of every 10 barrels shipped last month after buying nothing from the region as recently as October.

But there is also a bigger geopolitical dimension to Russia’s withdrawal from the output-cutting pact, just as there was to its joining. Participation served Putin’s ambitions to rebuild Russia’s influence in the Middle East. Withdrawal is aimed at punishing the U.S. for its repeated attacks on Russia’s energy interests through sanctions, which have stifled Arctic offshore exploration and shale development, prevented the completion a gas pipeline to Europe under the Baltic Sea, and targeted the Venezuelan business of Russia’s state-oil producer Rosneft.

Saudi Arabia led OPEC in a war on shale in 2014, when it introduced the pump-at-will policy. It failed then, capitulating as oil prices collapsed a year later. But U.S. producers from Exxon Mobil Corp. to Continental Resources Inc. are already being hammered and now may be a more auspicious time to launch an attack.

Even if it fails again, Russia intends to make sure that U.S. oil companies share the pain of the collapse in oil demand. Saudi Arabia appears wiling to help it. The next few months will be ugly.

– – –

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Lee is an oil strategist for Bloomberg. Previously he worked as a senior analyst at the Centre for Global Energy Studies.

At 71, Harvard-educated Jakurski is seen as a godfather to Brazil’s now booming hedge fund industry. Several top managers credit “the Jakurski way” with helping them lure new cash as peers abroad increasingly lose out to passive investing or quant strategies. Over a career spanning more than 45 years, he’s traded for George Soros, mentored billionaire banker Andre Esteves, and partnered with future Economy Minister Paulo Guedes to found a bank now called Banco BTG Pactual. In 1998, Jakurski and Guedes started JGP Asset Management, one of Brazil’s first hedge funds, at a time when fellow money managers thought, Why bother?

“When I started trading stocks, I was a one-eyed man in a country of the blind,” says Jakurski, who became famous in the 1990s for a risky telecommunications shares trade that multiplied sixteenfold Pactual’s proprietary capital in a year. “Back then it was almost impossible to move around in the market. There were times when it took me three months to buy and then three more months to sell. I spent most days on the phone-yelling.”

In a rare interview, Jakurski sits in the conference room of JGP’s headquarters in Rio de Janeiro’s Humaitá neighborhood, under the auspices of the Christ the Redeemer statue. Soft-spoken and measured, he’s nursing a bad cold, for which he’s taking antibiotics, and waves off a photographer who starts snapping pictures while he’s talking. The cameraman is, however, welcome to sit and take part in the conversation that wanders from the personal to the professional and-at times-the philosophical.

It used to be that sky-high borrowing costs in Brazil meant investors had to do very little to earn a healthy return, while hedge fund pioneers such as Jakurski had to do a hell of a lot to top them trading stocks. Brazil’s benchmark Selic interest rate, which averaged about 14% in the past two decades and at one point hit 45%, now sits at a record low 4.25%.

It’s no coincidence, then, that with every notch downward, more asset managers have opened shop and more money has flowed their way. Brazilian funds managed 5.4 trillion reais ($1.23 trillion) at the end of last year, an almost fivefold increase from a decade earlier, according to capital markets association Anbima. Only 28 billion reais of that sat in exchange-traded funds.

“Brazil was always a nation where you had zero-risk government bonds and guaranteed returns-no one wanted to mess with that,” Jakurski says. “What we’re seeing now is a revolution in how money is allocated.”

Among top funds benefiting from this new environment are Constellation Investments, Verde Asset Management, and BlueLine Asset Management-each with a resident Jakurski mentee.

And while Jakurski is often overshadowed by his more famous protégés and former partners, the JGP Equity Master FIA fund returned 34.65% last year, 3.5 percentage points more than the benchmark Ibovespa stock index. With 20 billion reais in assets under management, JGP is still one of the biggest independent hedge funds in Brazil.

So what, exactly, is the Jakurski way?

Luciano Brandao, head of equity at BlueLine, breaks it down like this: consistency, leverage, and capital preservation. At BlueLine, the 220 million-real hedge fund firm founded by former JPMorgan Chase executives, Brandao says, about 30% of the firm’s equity portfolio is managed with that in mind-as opposed to his usual “double alpha strategy,” which targets gains through short and long positions. BlueLine’s Blue Alpha Master FIM fund has returned 10.32% since its inception on May 31, 2019, compared with 3.82% for its benchmark through Feb. 12.

Pedro Sales, portfolio manager at Verde, expands on the method: “Jakurski has a macro outlook, which is great for the medium to long term, but in the day-to-day, he often just goes on market feeling,” says Sales, whose Verde Am Long Bias Master FIA fund posted a 37.66% gain in 2019. “It’s not uncommon for him to make short-term bets that completely contradict his long-term view.”

Over the course of the interview, as he talks, Jakurski shares some of those views and his own story, touching on everything from why he chose Harvard over Stanford (“We didn’t have much money at the time, and we figured the plane ticket to Harvard was cheaper”) to what it was like starting out (“Twenty years on a trading desk, and it was always infernal screaming-now it’s as quiet as a tomb”) to why he’d never move to São Paulo, Latin America’s financial hub (“I want to stay in Rio, doing my job, having fun”).

Jakurski has a special affinity for Rio de Janeiro, the city where he was born after his parents immigrated to Brazil following World War II. They met before the war, were from the Polish resistance movement and got imprisoned in two Nazi camps in Poland, he says.

He earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering from Pontificia Universidade Católica, a university in Rio, and pursued an MBA at Harvard Business School. His father persuaded him to get the business degree, as he needed Jakurski to manage his public lighting firm, which installed lights for streets and soccer stadiums. When the young Jakurski returned to Brazil after finishing at Harvard, he was “in love” with finance and decided not to go to work at his father’s company. He was soon recruited for a career as a banker.

Jakurski started out at Unibanco, which merged with Banco Itau in 2008 and is now Latin America’s biggest bank by market value. After stints in leasing and investment and commercial banking, he was offered a big promotion: to become the bank’s head of treasury and proprietary trading. But it came with a caveat: He’d have to move to São Paulo. “I said no, and that was the end of my career at Unibanco,” he recalls.

In 1983 the banker Luiz Cesar Fernandes asked Jakurski and Guedes to co-found Banco Pactual, which became powerhouse BTG Pactual. Guedes and Jakurski had the same combustible chemistry as other famous business duos-a Jobs and Wozniak or a Gates and Allen-with Guedes the temperamental visionary and Jakurski the get-it-done trader.

In 1991, after a 70% stock market collapse, Jakurski made his most legendary trade: He leveraged up heavily and pooled all Pactual’s proprietary capital into two telecommunications stocks. They both shot up in price, with one of them, Telebras, soaring from $2 to $32 in a year, he says, handing Pactual and clients that sixteenfold return.

Such extreme wagers, where a portfolio is concentrated in one or two investments, should be made only in “moments when all the variables are in your favor,” he says. “Opportunities like that are very rare. When they do come along, you’ve got to go for the jugular.”

In an age when central banks are pumping liquidity into the markets and one tweet from President Trump can send markets into a tailspin, such surefire windows are getting harder and harder to find, Jakurski says.

Thanks to his telecommunications trade, Pactual became a relevant player in Brazilian markets. The bank could take leading proprietary positions on carry trades that exploited the difference between international and domestic interest rates by borrowing in dollars and investing in reais, with earnings as big as 60% a year. Jakurski and Guedes’ reputation grew while about 90% of Pactual’s profit came from trading. The duo decided to take advantage of their fame and leave to create their own hedge fund. It was at JGP that their relationship deteriorated, leading to Guedes’s departure. Guedes declined to comment for this article. Jakurski declined to discuss Guedes’s leaving JGP.

A generation of famous would-be investors and bankers got their start at Pactual under Jakurski, including Esteves, who began as a computer technician in 1989, and Florian Bartunek, a former intern who’s now the chief investment officer at Constellation.

Esteves, BTG’s biggest shareholder, spoke of Jakurski’s ongoing influence in a panel at the bank’s investor event in July: “Jakurski has been my partner for many years, my boss, and the father of the risk management DNA at the bank, [which] is a reason to be proud.”

Bartunek says he still relies in part on the risk management methodology Jakurski taught him. “With Jakurski, it was never just a question of teaching the craft but also shaping personalities,” he says. “He was always tough but fair. You couldn’t make a mistake. He’d find the error.” With a weariness that’s gripped much of the active management world amid the rise in passive investing, Bartunek adds: “He’s a dying breed.”

Even as the industry booms in Brazil, hedge fund managers are all too aware of what’s happening abroad. The U.S. recorded more fund closures than launches for a fifth year in 2019, a blow to a $3 trillion market that once minted millionaires at a heady pace. Investors yanked out almost $98 billion last year, more than twice the amount in 2018, as high fees and mediocre returns sent them searching for yield elsewhere, according to EVestment data.

The rush toward ETFs is just one of the seismic shifts that have rocked the investment world since Jakurski started. The “obsession” for passive investment, he warns, brings with it systemic risks. “The ETFs all offer immediate liquidity, but their assets that replicate indexes don’t necessarily have that kind of liquidity,” he says.

He marvels at other changes, too, that he says turned the market into a “casino.” Quantitative easing is a topic that earns an outsize amount of scorn from Jakurski. “Only the wealthy who hold financial assets have benefited,” he says. “Poor people are angry. They’re saying, ‘This system doesn’t interest me.’ ”

Jakurski himself has stopped trading stocks outside Brazil and instead plans to return to his credit roots. He’s keen to further develop JGP’s data business for collecting information on pricing and trade volume of Brazilian corporate debt in the secondary market. The firm has already used the data to create an index.

Seven minutes into the two-hour interview, Jakurski’s phone rings. “Hang on, hang on,” he says.

On the other end of the line, Jakurski’s son is calling from Harvard. Paulo Roberto, named after Guedes, plans to follow in his father’s footsteps in other ways, as well; he’s in line to take over managing the family’s investments. Jakurski listens for a moment. “I told you not to short the S&P on the eve of a Fed meeting. You saw the message but didn’t act, right?” he says, his even tone never changing. Another pause. “Well, you better scrap it.”

The legendary fund manager, it seems, still has his mentees-even if not all of them consistently follow the Jakurski way.

I’m reminded of the story by the advice being given now about the spreading coronavirus: Maintain “social distancing” – stay at least three feet away from potentially contagious people. Avoid crowded places. Work from home. “Stay at home if you begin to feel unwell, even with mild symptoms such as headache and slight runny nose, until you recover,” advises the World Health Organization, and get checked by a physician as soon as possible.

This is inconvenient but possible for people with good jobs and good insurance. Many can work remotely from home, resupplying their fortresses with bottled water, food and toilet paper via delivery services – Amazon, Instacart and FreshDirect have reported spikes in business. (Amazon Chief Executive Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.) Meals can be delivered by Postmates, UberEATS or Grubhub rather than risking a crowded restaurant. Public transit can be avoided via Uber or Lyft. With enough money and technology, it’s possible to sequester yourself from the rest of the world almost as completely as Prospero and his thousand friends in their abbey – and still have most of the comforts of your pre-coronavirus life.

But what about the workers keeping all those people supplied with diapers and bottled water? It just isn’t possible for them to follow most of the advice about avoiding the novel coronavirus, aside from handwashing. Uber may have advised its drivers to stay home if they have even a “mild illness” or a temperature above 100.4, but words mean nothing in this desperate economy.

Look at the built-in incentives for low-wage workers, and particularly for “gig economy” contract workers, and the scary fact is that the nature of their jobs will encourage them to keep working despite the risk of exposure to the virus – even if they are feeling sick themselves.

In the gig economy, and in an increasing slice of the service sector, companies use a loophole in employment law to claim their workers aren’t employees. Instead, they are classified as independent contractors – which implies they have the same control, freedom and negotiating power as self-employed plumbers or business consultants.

But gig economy workers bear little resemblance to high-end contractors who chose to trade the job security and safety net of being an employee for the bigger risks and bigger rewards of self-employment. Rather, they half-resemble them – gig economy workers generally shoulder most of the risks and costs of running a business, while the company retains most of the control and most of the rewards.

I’ll use Uber as an example – I once drove for it for a couple of months to report a story, so I’m familiar with the specifics of how the company works. Slow day driving for Uber? You get paid only for the minutes you have a passenger in your car, so the time you wasted waiting around for your next ride would be your problem. Put 150,000 miles on your car in a single year and need a new engine? Your property, your problem. Making below minimum wage an hour after years of the company unilaterally cutting its rates? Your problem – if you don’t like it, you’re free to quit. The taxes involved with running a business? Your problem, because you’re technically classified as a small business. Health care? Your problem, good luck figuring out the exchanges. (Uber’s argument is that “drivers are independent contractors because, among other things, they can choose whether, when, and where to provide services on our platform, are free to provide services on our competitors’ platforms,” and, thus, are more like those self-employed plumbers or business consultants than bus drivers or pizza delivery guys.)

Now say you’re an Uber driver with an epidemic breaking out. You picked up a passenger who seemed sick the other day, and now you’ve come down what feels like a minor cold. This actually happened to two Uber drivers in Mexico City who drove a coronavirus-infected tourist to and from the airport – Uber suspended the drivers and 240 other passengers who had ridden in their vehicles afterward and said it “sent them information about where to get health-care information.” Your rent is due next week, and you won’t have the money to pay it unless you go out and get some fares.

So what are you going to do? Stay home sick in the name of public health and risk your family getting evicted? Or, like you’ve done a thousand times before at jobs without paid sick leave, do you just go to work with what’s almost certainly just a cold?

Is that a real choice?

The motto of the modern American economy, and the “gig economy” in particular, might as well be “not our problem.”

It’s not Instacart’s problem if its workers will be frequenting the same crowded grocery stores that customers are too afraid to visit. It’s not Doordash’s problem if its delivery people don’t get paid sick leave or health insurance and, so, are less likely to stay home when sick or go get checked out by a doctor. It’s not Uber’s problem if drivers get exposed to the coronavirus by passengers, or that worker’s comp isn’t available for contractors who get sick or injured on the job. It’s not Amazon’s problem if its delivery drivers are in such bad financial shape that taking a couple of days off can mean the difference between paying the electric bill and not.

It’s not any of these companies’ problem that the incentives of the gig and low-wage economy come together to create perfect conditions for spreading an epidemic.

After six months behind the welded-shut gates, Prince Prospero finally throws an elaborate masquerade ball to raise morale. Guests arrive in their wildest costumes, involving “much of the beautiful, much of the wanton, much of the bizarre, something of the terrible, and not a little of that which might have excited disgust.” But despite the purposeful edginess, everyone’s appalled when someone shows up costumed as a victim of the Red Death, bloody and silent. It’s a joke too far. The prince is so offended that he confronts the figure with a dagger, intent on killing him. But the costume falls to the ground, empty; then, starting with Prince Prospero, all thousand revelers start falling to the plague. And in the end, Poe writes, “Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.”

That isn’t just a ghost story. It’s an immorality tale about the prosperous walling themselves and their resources off from the problems of the world, abandoning everyone else to their fate. When the rich and powerful can avoid any contact with serious societal problems – whether that’s a pandemic, underfunded public schools, or our brutal, nonsensical health-care system – they have little investment in fixing things.

But more than that, “Masque” is about the futility of trying to hide from societal problems. Watching your doorbell camera to ensure the delivery driver’s gone before you open the door isn’t literally welding your gates shut. But no matter how many times you insist something isn’t your problem, it will find its way in sooner or later. And by the time it does, it’ll have metastasized into a much, much bigger problem.

As the outbreak has spread from Asia to Europe and the U.S., concern has shifted from the impact on supply chains because of closed Chinese factories to the potential of the deadly disease to put a sudden brake on consumer spending.

While fashion chains and do-it-yourself merchandisers rely less on China today than they did a decade ago, it’s inevitable there will be some supply problems. The country is still the world’s biggest clothing exporter, and it makes everything from paddling pools to power tools. Associated British Foods Plc, owner of cheap chic fashion chain Primark, and U.S. athletic apparel maker Under Armour Inc. have recently warned of the risks.

A full understanding of the impact will only come later. Many spring fashions and home furnishings were shipped before the outbreak, and there is evidence that factories are returning to work. But the closures in February will mean that some orders for the summer and potentially even the back-to-school shopping seasons may not reach stores in time. For apparel retailers this is a particular risk. If say, pastel hued coats designed to be worn in the spring arrive when the weather is warmer, those coats will need to be discounted to sell.

But some canceled orders may be a blessing.

The worry now is not that shoppers won’t find what they are looking for, it’s that they won’t hit the mall and spend time browsing for it in the first place. Almost half of U.K. retailers surveyed by consultancy Retail Economics and law firm Squire Patton Boggs had already seen a negative impact on their sales, with three quarters expecting revenue to be hit if the virus continues, according to a report published on Wednesday.

This adds to anecdotal evidence, from some retailers finding trading tougher than expected to others seeing footfall weaken. In the U.K., traffic to stores held up until Thursday, but as bad news about the virus intensified, shopper numbers dropped, particularly in malls. Even for a Tuesday evening in March, London’s Oxford Street seemed unusually quiet yesterday. Expect the same pattern in the U.S. as new cases pop up in new cities.

It would be understandable if people hesitate to head to the mall and avoid lingering at the supermarket after filling their cart with hand sanitizer, toilet paper and food staples for a month. After all, employers such as Amazon.com Inc. are telling workers to limit non-essential travel and governments in countries like France are banning events for more than 5,000, leaving worried citizens to wonder how many people is too many people in one place. And with Covid-19’s symptoms silent for a long incubation period it can be tempting to avoid public spaces altogether.

Reasons for splurging at the shops are also evaporating as major events get canceled or delayed, and by extension people contemplate skipping parties, weddings or graduations. For example, tech giants including Facebook Inc. and Twitter Inc. have pulled out of the South by Southwest tech conference in Austin, Texas. That means purchases that would have been made — from trendy sneakers to wear at SXSW to the suit to impress at any number of industry conferences — may be lost.

Travel is another boon to spending that risks being sapped. Tour operator TUI AG said holiday bookings have weakened over the past week. Unless they come back later on, that means fewer bikinis and tubes of suntan lotion filling shopping carts. If the problem is consumers hibernating, then online retailers such as Amazon and Britain’s Asos Plc, could be protected. But if the issue is a lack of stimulants to spending, no one will be spared. There’s also the knock on effect on restaurants and bars if consumers stay home.

There may be some offsetting factors. For example, Brits and Americans have been bulk buying essentials in retailers such as Costco Wholesale Corp. Long-life milk, nappies and bottled water are all in demand at supermarkets. At the other end of the spectrum, shares in Peloton Interactive Inc. defied the market rout last week on hopes that more fitness fanatics would work out at home, rather than go to the gym.

Any short-term silver linings will be lost if consumers simply hunker down. The risk of a pandemic, as well as market uncertainty or worse, are hardly conducive to splashing out. Britons had started spending again after pulling in their purse strings during the impasse over their departure from the European Union. In contrast, U.S. consumer confidence has remained remarkably robust. But cracks are emerging. U.K. consumer confidence dropped for the first time in five months, according to YouGov and the Centre for Economics and Business Research. Meanwhile, in the U.S., the Bloomberg Weekly Consumer Comfort Index suffered its largest one-week drop since late October in the week ending Feb. 23.

As with trading, it’s hard to separate out what’s due to the virus and what’s down to other factors. But either way, it’s a timely reminder that faced with an epidemic, consumer demand also isn’t immune.

– – –

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg LP and its owners. Andrea Felsted is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering the consumer and retail industries. She previously worked at the Financial Times.

Inclusive marketing means creating content that truly reflects the diverse communities that your company serves. As marketers, our responsibility is to relay our brands’ messaging in a way that resonates with people from all backgrounds, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender identity, age, religion, ability, sexual orientation, or otherwise.

According to Salesforce’s research, 90 per cent of consumers believe that businesses have a responsibility to look beyond profit and improve the state of the world. Synchronously, Nielsen reports that “with 43 per cent of the 75 million millennials in the US identifying as African American, Hispanic, or Asian, if a brand doesn’t have a multicultural strategy, it doesn’t have a growth strategy.”

1. Start with tone

Tone is the style, characteristic, or sentiment of a piece of content. Often when people are offended or turned off by a piece but can’t quite put their finger on why, tone is at the centre. Consider the intended subject, topic, message, and overall impact of a piece in the planning stages to help reach the right and respectful tone.

2. Be intentional with language

Language includes the words, phrases, symbols, or metaphors used to describe something. There is immense power in language — it can deepen understanding and strengthen relationships, or it can confuse or even cause harm. It’s an important practice to carefully consider every word, symbol, or phrase — not just what the words say, but also how and where they are placed.

3. Ensure representation

Representation is the visible presence of a variety of identities in a story, image, video, and more. People want to see themselves reflected in media — it helps us to all feel empowered, inspired and heard. Before publishing an advertisement or hosting a panel, for example, ask — does this reflect society? Am I elevating diverse voices?

4. Consider context

Context can be defined as the circumstances that inform an event or piece of content. This could mean the historical or cultural influences and also extends to the order and hierarchy of the subjects. One example of order and hierarchy is when you search “manager and employee” in stock photography, often seeing a male employee standing over a woman colleague, implying certain power dynamics. Work to develop your own photography and revise your stock repository to ensure that photos are not only diverse but that they are considering order and hierarchy.

5. Avoid appropriation

Appropriation is often defined as taking or using an aspect from a minority culture without knowing or honouring the meaning behind it. Drawing from people’s cultures, traditions, and personal experiences can be both subjective and sensitive. We can all lead with cultural respect and awareness by being mindful of nuance and historical context, honouring and learning the culture, seeking guidance and diverse opinions, evaluating intent and impact, and elevating authentic voices.

6. Counter-stereotype

Counter-stereotype is a phrase that means going against a standardised image that represents an oversimplified opinion, prejudiced attitude, or uncritical judgment. Imagine a world where the marketing images around us shattered these stereotypes rather than emboldened them. This is where we as marketers have the power to change the society around us.

We could start reimagining . . .

…what a CEO looks like:

….what an athlete looks like:

….what love looks like:

Adopt an inclusive review process

And finally, it’s important to have an inclusive review process to help catch any concerns or improve marketing before it goes out the door. When in doubt, always look at everything through the lens of these six principles.

(The writer is senior vice president and CMO, Asia Pacific Marketing, Salesforce)

Over the past year, we saw four industry mega-trends across Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) that are likely to lead organisations in the region to redesign how they manage and protect their data in 2020 and beyond:

Data value: Data is not merely supportive of the business anymore; increasingly data is the business. The increasing value of data is driving organisations to retain more information so that they can explore new opportunities to increase customer loyalty, bring new services to market, and compete more effectively.

Multi-cloud approach: Over the past year, enterprises have increasingly turned to the cloud. “In a recent Gartner survey of public cloud users, 81 per cent of respondents said they are working with two or more providers.”* Enterprises are using on-premise data services while leveraging cloud services, without being locked into a single cloud provider.

Cloud native applications, consisting of containers and functions, introduce new characteristics to workloads and data. They enable greater portability as applications can move seamlessly from cloud-to-cloud as well as between on-premise data centers and multiple public clouds. Given the fluidity and highly transient nature of cloud-native applications, organisations increasingly need the flexibility to perform data protection operations anywhere cloud native apps reside. Likewise, it is also important to have the ability to protect cloud native entities in one location with the option to recover the data from somewhere else – so they are not tied to where they are running.

Distributed data: Data is increasingly being created out across edge locations as well as moving between core data center and multi-cloud environments. For enterprises, ensuring the protection and recoverability of all this information will become increasingly challenging.

Application transformation: Organisations are moving increasingly towards Agile application deployment methodologies to speed up time-to-market and acceleration innovation that is driving the adoption of cloud-native applications based on Kubernetes containers and functions. As organisations move to cloud-native applications, they need to continue protecting traditional workloads like Exchange, SQL, Oracle, SAP Hana and file system data in addition to managing next generation workloads like SaaS applications and cloud-native applications deployed in containers, as well as functions and low-code apps. As application architectures change, so does the data – in form, construct, and volume. This transition needs to be considered as a part of the design and when we gain a new application, we might lose control of some of the data in the process.

Emerging risks

The exponential data growth combined with increasing data value is creating opportunities but also new risks as organisations grapple with how to reliably and sustainably protect their information. According to Dell Technologies’ Global Data Protection Index, Asia Pacific & Japan (APJ) organisations managed on average 8.13 petabytes of data in 2018 alone. Dell Technologies’ research found on average that for organisations that lost data, an average of 2.04TB was lost, with a price tag of nearly US$1 million (Bt32 million). As the value of an enterprise’s data increases, the cost of data lost increases substantially. Companies also face increased security threats and cyber-attacks. In APJ, many organisations lack the deep expertise and ability to fully leverage their “security” technologies to protect their data from sophisticated hackers. Recent ransomware cases especially in the financial services industry, utilities and critical infrastructure, as well as the public sector especially local governments are testimony to the urgent need for organisations to create robust processes to manage and safeguard data. Without a well-thought-out data protection strategy, the chances of creating value are greatly diminished.

With data increasingly being distributed across the edge, the core and the cloud, “Where is my data and is it protected?” is becoming an increasingly vital question.

The way forward for businesses

In 2020 and the years beyond, organisations will need to leverage both, proven data protection solutions that deliver the foundational data protection required to protect traditional workloads as well as with modern data protection technology that offer a range of capabilities to customers in APJ:

Cloud native protection — that includes the ability to protect cloud-native workloads like Mongo DB, Hadoop and Cloudera as well as SaaS applications like O365. It also includes the ability to protect applications deployed on Kubernetes containers or distributed as functions in the cloud.

Autonomous protection — that auto-detects and auto-protects application workloads regardless of the platform they are deployed on as well as protection services that have the ability to follow workloads wherever they operate across edge-to-core-to cloud infrastructure.

Business service recovery — the ability to automatically orchestrate the recovery of an entire business service by recovering all of the disparate hardware and software elements that make up a business service as they are deployed on-premise, in the cloud or both.

Data services — the ability to ensure protection, security, efficiency and compliance of workloads wherever they live across multi-cloud environments. Moreover, capabilities to deliver more business value by enabling on-demand access to secondary copies of data to accelerate innovation and drive deeper business insight.

In the new data decade, organisations that leverage comprehensive data management and protection capabilities across their multi-platform and multi-cloud environments, will be prepared to effectively mitigate emerging risks, accelerate innovation, lower costs, and optimise business outcomes. Ultimately, with the right people and the right data management solutions, an enterprise can move beyond traditional data protection, and unlock the value of its data.

(Alex Lei is vice president, Data Protection Solutions, Asia Pacific & Japan, Dell Technologies)