Calculating the Grim Economic Costs of Ebola Outbreak…(Blame Ebola For The Collapse?!)
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
NYTimes.com
October 13, 2014
The topic everyone on Wall Street is discussing urgently but quietly isn’t the volatile stock market.
It is Ebola.
While thousands of health care workers seek to control the deadly virus in West Africa, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical professionals seek to prevent its outbreak in the United States, financial analysts and others have been trying to estimate — or “model,” in Wall Street parlance — the potential effect on the global economy.
The math is not pretty.
The most authoritative model, at the moment, suggests a potential economic drain of as much as $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if “the epidemic spreads into neighboring countries” beyond Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to a recent study by the World Bank.
That estimate is considered a worst-case scenario, but it does not account for any costs beyond the next 18 months, nor does it assume a global pandemic.
The Rest…HERE
