Katrina will stimulate GDP growth, not hinder it
In recent days numerous forecasts have been issued about the negative effect Katrina is going to have on US GDP growth rate over the next couple of quarters. The first of those I saw was by Goldman Sachs and said growth rate will be reduced by 0.5 % and many more have followed. There is unanimous agreement on that point directionally. They are all wrong. The effect of Katrina will be to stimulate growth and not hinder it. I have no idea by how much but certainly to some degree. In normal times, the area affected by the hurricane accounts for approximately 1% of total US retail sales. Because the area is not in any obvious way likely to account for higher percentage of the total output one can safely assume that not a significantly larger proportion of productive capacity of the US economy is located there. While the normal 1% of output in that area will certainly be smaller than that over the next year, the amount of consumption that the area accounts for will increase significantly. T