00:00Hurricane Melissa made landfall in the country of Jamaica earlier today as a Category 5 with sustained winds of 185 miles an hour, about 298 kilometers per hour.
00:10Joining us right now to discuss the potential economic impact is Matthew Palazzoa of Bloomberg Intelligence who covers insurance companies.
00:17And I know it's still too early to know exactly what the scale of damage is.
00:21But given that this does appear to be the strongest hurricane to make landfall in Jamaica, I would assume the cost is going to be high.
00:28Yeah, I mean, so it's pretty rare to see a Category 5 hurricane make landfall anywhere in the Atlantic.
00:33So this is a pretty rare event.
00:35What we're going to see is, I would say, high single-digit billions in economic losses.
00:42But I do think there's going to be a wide gap between economic losses and insured losses.
00:46And how potentially does that stack up to some of the other natural disasters, some of the other hurricanes that we've seen in the past couple years?
00:53It would be, in terms of insured losses, a pretty mild event.
00:56And we've seen hurricane losses up to 50 billion, insured losses, which means that could be like 100 billion of economic losses.
01:04So this would be much smaller than a U.S. landfall hurricane.
01:08Just real quickly, do we have any sense as to whether this hurricane might actually hit other nations as well that might actually have material costs too?
01:15Yeah, I mean, probably not in terms of insured losses.
01:18It's going to hit Cuba after Jamaica, but we're not going to see anything in the U.S.
01:22It might also hit Bermuda a little further up.
01:24So that's all I've seen, and this guy's going to be in the U.S.
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