Katrina and housing bubble

How will it pan out?
How much pressure on supply side? (people needing to be housed)
How much will insurance money prop up builders and contractors whose market might otherwise have abated as bubble popped?
How will P & C premiums be impacted?
How much mortgage default will we see?
How will defaulted mortgage-backeds impact yield curve?

How will monetary policy be impacted?
Deferred or reversed rate hikes?
(Will Greenspan stay on 6 months more?)
How will total carrying cost of housing be impacted?
Probably we'll see a regression to mean ratio of cost of renting to earning?

How will federal goverment finance the ca. $75 bln dollars not covered by insurance?
More of the long bond?
Repeal of provisional Bush tax code line items?
(Estate tax a likely and easy target in class warfare environment)

How will Chinese treasury view additional US debt in an oil shock environment?

One thing's for certain, it won't be solved with a telethon.

More than 9/11, this is the big test of our systemic risk management.
At least unemployment and corporate profit trends are better going into this than they were 4 years ago.
Ironically, one of the big saving graces for the US economy now vs. then is that more services have been offshored to India, etc. That's one big business continuity plan. Healthy redundancy
And Sarbanes-Oxley and Spitzer, for all their occasional excesses, decrease the probability of a bunch of Enrons and Worldcoms riding on the coattails of this. We hope.