Trading on Wall Street will resume Wednesday as
insurance companies and government officials begin adding up the
damages from the superstorm Sandy in the north-east US.
Preliminary projections say damages from Monday and Tuesday's
disasters could reach into the tens of billions of dollars.
Both the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE) and the Nasdaq will be
open and operating normally Wednesday, the two markets said. The
two-day closure was the longest weather-related shutdown in more than
a century.
The heads of the markets decided to close them as Sandy approached
Sunday out of concern for employee safety. New York City experienced
extensive flooding and its public transportation system is shut down
- possibly for days - due to the storm, which hit hardest in New York
City and New Jersey. Sandy made landfall Monday evening.
NYSE spokesman Robert Rendine said the exchange's trading floor
and building were not damaged by Sandy, a hybrid superstorm that
started out as a hurricane before slamming the US mid-Atlantic East
Coast as a post-tropical cyclone.
The chief operating officer of NYSE, Larry Leibowitz, said the
headquarters were running on backup power and would continue using it
all week if necessary, according to Bloomberg news service. Wall
Street is near areas of Manhattan that were deluged by a record
4.2-metre sea surge.
Traders were eager to get back into action especially before the
end of the month, a time when many stock funds and investors measure
the status of their holdings.
The storm damaged rail lines, subway stations, power lines,
airports, roads, beaches and buildings in the public space alone.
Countless homes and personal property such as cars were damaged in a
16-state region from South Carolina north to Maine and west to Ohio.
In one of the worst results of storm-related property loss, in the
borough of Queens, a fire fanned by Sandy's winds destroyed at least
80 homes. Aerial photos showed the gambling paradise of Atlantic City
covered with water and with sand heaped among partially destroyed
holiday cottages.
Losses are expected to run into the tens of billions of dollars,
reports said, quoting insurance experts. Charles Watson, research and
development director at Kinetic Analysis Corporation, said only
between 7 billion dollars and 8 billion dollars of the total would be
insured.
The forecasting firm IHS Global Insight told Fox News Sandy would
end up causing about 20 billion dollars in property damage and 10
billion dollars to 30 billion dollars more in lost business, making
it one of the costliest natural disasters on record in the US.
The cost of electrical outages and the expense incurred by
travellers stranded by the grounding of more than 16,000 flights was
impossible to calculate.
Damage to public infrastructure would be similar to damage caused
by Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans in 2005, said Watson. Katrina was
the nation's most costly natural disaster with an estimated 41.1
billion dollars in insured property losses, according to the
Insurance Information Institute. That figure does not include about
20 billion dollars in flood damage and damage to off-shore oil rigs.
Factory and refinery closures due to the storms would also count
among the economic losses. The closure of casinos in Atlantic City
would have an impact.
The storm delayed the release of the consumer confidence index by
the private Conference Board, which compiles the figure for release
on a monthly basis. The board said the data would be released
Thursday. That will be one day ahead of the release of the US
unemployment figure.
Both figures take on special significance in the final days before
the November 6 presidential elections, where the stagnant economy
plays a major role.
