My Catastrophe Beats Yours

This is an apocalyptic week, especially on Wall Street. The hundreds of billions of dollars people talk about make me feel like I've been transported to Zimbabwe. I suppose a quick jolt in the stock market could make money evaporate at the rate of a billion dollars a minute. Imagine that!

Geologists can imagine much worse. In my own neighborhood of Oakland, California, a repeat of the 1868 earthquake on the Hayward fault will cause a couple hundred billion in damage in about a minute. A talk I'm seeing tonight—a close look at that quake—will probably turn my hair white; if not, the earthquake itself surely will. And the dreaded next great subduction quake in Cascadia, and the dreaded next great quake in Southern California, would undoubtedly rival it.

But last year I heard seismologist Ross Stein lay out an even direr scenario: a repeat of the 1923 Kanto earthquake, in the Tokyo region, would cost roughly a trillion dollars, something like $250 billion a minute. With its ensuing financial ripples, that would be a global catastrophe, a different order of event from this week's gyrations in virtual money.