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The topic everyone on Wall Street is discussing urgently but quietly isn't the volatile stock market.
It is Ebola.
While thousands of health care workers seek to control the deadly virus in West Africa, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and other medical professionals seek to prevent its outbreak in the United States, financial analysts and others have been trying to estimate - or "model," in Wall Street parlance - the potential effect on the global economy.
The math is not pretty.
The most authoritative model, at the moment, suggests a potential economic drain of as much as $32.6 billion by the end of 2015 if "the epidemic spreads into neighbouring countries" beyond Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone, according to a recent study by the World Bank.
That estimate is considered a worst-case scenario, but it does not account for any costs beyond the next 18 months, nor does it assume a global pandemic.
Over the weekend, the topic of Ebola was front and centre at the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank in Washington, where central bankers, world leaders and some of Wall Street's senior executives held a series of meetings and dinners.
Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund, was seen wearing a button that read: "Isolate Ebola, Not Countries." She implored the audience: "We should be very careful not to terrify the planet in respect of the whole of Africa."
That's because the economic cost of fear, far more than medical costs, may be the most expensive outcome.
"Economic consequences also result when fear and concern change behaviour," David R Kotok, the chairman and chief investment officer of Cumberland Advisors, wrote in a report late last week, addressing the potential fallout on gross domestic products. "If consumers and businesses retrench by reducing flights on airplanes, changing vacation plans or altering business connections in a globally interdependent world, gross domestic product growth rates will fall farther. We do not know how much, at what speed, or for how long."
Shares of airline stocks like United and American fell on Monday as some investors began to worry about the prospect of travel bans for airlines from West Africa to Europe and the United States.
Andrew Zarnett, an analyst at Deutsche Bank, wrote a recent report that examined the potential effects of Ebola and compared it to the economic toll of the SARS epidemic, which cost Asian airlines about $6 billion in 2003.
"History has shown us that should the Ebola epidemic spread domestically, it will have a significant impact on the airline and the entire hospitality sector," he wrote, according to FXStreet, a financial news service.
And nobody has yet fully calculated the numbers on the cost to the health care system: training, testing, treatment, waste disposal - and all the hospital beds that are sitting unused in isolation areas. (Perversely enough, many of the health care costs could conceivably help that industry in the short term because additional money is being spent.)
Of course, the greatest economic danger is in the economic isolation of countries. "By default or design, it really is an economic embargo," Kaifala Marah, finance minister of Sierra Leone, said over the weekend about his country, which has been all but cut off from the outside world.
The newest estimates about the economic cost of Ebola, conducted by John Panzer and Francisco Ferreira of the World Bank, may be the deepest look at the problem by any analyst or economist. The report notes that in the very short term, assuming that the spread of Ebola is contained, the economic costs should be low, about $359 million.
The study gets more worrying as the authors examine the economic prospects 18 months out.
The authors developed the "Ebola Impact Index." As one of their advisors, Marcelo Giugale, senior director of the World Bank's global practice for macroeconomics and fiscal management, wrote of the index: "It roughly tells you how likely countries in Africa, Europe and the US are to be affected by Ebola. They then used some pretty sophisticated statistical tools to model the economic links between West Africa and the rest of the world. And finally, they built two 'scenarios' for how governments and people might behave."
One scenario contemplates containment of the virus with no more than 20,000 cases. That's the good version. The bad version is this: Governments make a series of mistakes that lead to 200,000 cases of Ebola. It is that scenario that they estimate would cost $32.6 billion. "What makes all this very interesting is that the final economic toll of Ebola will not be driven by the direct costs of the disease itself - expensive drugs, sick employees and busy caregivers. It will be driven by how much those who are not infected trust their governments," Giugale wrote.
Wall Street has long built spreadsheets trying to estimate employment, economic growth figures and the values of businesses. But the economic variables of a true pandemic are almost incalculable. It becomes a series of guesstimates about the psychology of global citizens.
Right now, the economic challenges of the outbreak of Ebola are minimal. Let's hope they remain that way.
The number of Ebola cases in three West African nations may jump to between 5,000 and 10,000 a week by December 1 as the deadly viral infection spreads, the World Health Organization (WHO) said.
The outbreak is still expanding geographically in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia and accelerating in capital cities, Bruce Aylward, the WHO's assistant director-general in charge of the Ebola response, said in a briefing with reporters in Geneva. There have been about 1,000 new cases a week for the past three to four weeks, he said.
"Any sense that the great effort that's been kicked off over the last couple of months is already starting to see an impact, that would be really, really premature," Aylward said adding that, "The virus is still moving geographically and still escalating in capitals, and that's what concerns me." The WHO's forecast shows the magnitude of the task facing governments and aid groups as they try to bring the worst-ever Ebola outbreak under control. More than 8,900 people have been infected with Ebola in the three countries, with more than 4,400 deaths, the WHO said.
The effects of the epidemic have rippled outward in recent weeks, adding to concern that Ebola may spread in the US and Europe. The first two cases of Ebola being contracted outside Africa occurred, with health workers in Madrid and Dallas falling ill after caring for infected patients. The US and the UK began screening some airline passengers on arrival in the past few days.
There's no cure for Ebola, which jumps to humans from animals such as fruit bats and chimpanzees. The virus spreads from contact with bodily fluids such as blood, vomit and feces. Burial practices in West Africa, where mourners come in contact with corpses, have fueled the spread.
To bring the outbreak under control, there needs to be a common operational plan among all aid groups and governments, Aylward said. That means having people in every county or district responsible for burials, finding infected people and tracing who they've been in contact with, and isolating those who are ill and managing their care, he said.
"Those pieces are not systematically in place," he said.
By December 1, the WHO's goal is for 70 percent of those who die from the disease to be buried safely and 70 percent of cases to properly managed, Aylward said. If those goals are met, that should allow for the number of new cases to decline from week to week beginning in January, he said.
'Bleak news'
The number of new cases is slowing in some areas, such as Lofa County, Liberia, and Kenema and Kailahun in Sierra Leone, he said. Aylward, a Canadian epidemiologist, went to Sierra Leone and Guinea last week and is returning tomorrow to Accra, Ghana, where the United Nations has established an office to coordinate the response to the outbreak.
"There's a lot of bleak news out there about this outbreak and there should be," Aylward said. Still, "there are a lot of things that are positive," he said.
Only 30 percent at most of those who fall ill in Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia survive infection with Ebola, Aylward said. "This is a horrible, unforgiving disease," he said. "You've got to get to zero" cases.
Ebola is pushing economies in the region to the breaking point and billions of dollars are needed to offset the economic damage wrought by the virus, Guinean President Alpha Conde said in an interview with Bloomberg Africa TV.