Katrina effect on economy?

Just thinking for myself here. Not that I cared to read much, will do it later.

An immediate effect of the Katrina on US, and consequently on world economy, is devastating: having Mexico gulf oil production gone down by 95% (are they getting the other 5% by scrabing the water surface for what spilled out?) boosted the oil prices up dramatically and well, the rest of the prices will follow shortly. Then they say it is not the last hurricane and all that. And insurance companies do not sound good either. With all the prospects as we got explained a couple of months ago (about major world economies going down) we are entering gloomy times.

But new day brings new thoughts, at least to me, at least sometimes.
Look at this: global economic crisis is known to be resolved by global war. Free, western style economies do well after wars for they get new or renewed markets to fill. Now when looking at Katrina consequences, we see a lot of devastation, millions in need for new housing and EVERYTHING else. From consumer goods to oil and chemical industries equipment, they are going to spend and spend a lot. And apparently they have money to spend - either insurance payments or aid transhes. In terms of devastations and cleaning the path to developments this Katrina may well play a role of a war.

So with all the due grief for missfortuned people (I still wonder why they did not order evacuation by force?!) can we be optimistic now?

This was a guess, and now I'm going to go out and get some figures and do some serious reading on the subject.

наши достижения

http://www.nationmaster.com/country/is/Top-Rankings

So much about statistics:
according to nationmaster.com Israel is ranked top in 6 categories:
agriculture, health, environment, military, mortality, religion.
Note that agriculture actually about onion export to US per capita (sic!),
environment is about level of water polution and religion is about number of Jews - at last, this one looks sane.

Then looking at the number of items under mortality category, doesnt it mean we are the only ones that care about these numbers?

Another two searches:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/eco_res_and_dev_spe
(Israel is the 3rd in Research and development spending, 3.7% Total (of what?)

but is nowhere in first 18 of
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-B/eco_bus_spe_in_res_and_dev&int=-1#
Business spending in research and development, ) of GDP.

Does this mean or R&D is mostly sponsored by the goverment? Or that all the business doing R&D are actually foreign (like IBM and HP?).

New Orleans sattelite images - before and after

http://hosted.ap.org/specials/neworleanssatellite/index.html