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Snow: the billion pound black swan

Yes, we have a number! The economic impact of today’s catastrophic snowfall has been calculated! And according to the Federation of Small Businesses it is…

£1,200,000,000

Which, by unhappy coincidence is just about the size of the government’s small business bailout fund - which clocks in at £1.3bn.

Our favourite observation on the snow cataclysm disaster furore panic so far though, from commenter Billy on an earlier post:

Don’t know why we are so hard on ourselves. I live in Amsterdam and an inch of snow stops the place too (they can’t even grit the main roads in the centre of the city!). All the, ‘how did we have an empire?’ comments are just stupid - what’s the NPV of having the infrastructure in place to tackle one week of snow a year? I bet it would be negative.

Indeed, snowfall of this kind… well, it’s kind of a black swan event isn’t it?

Black Swan