The Economic Impacts of Hurricanes | Cents of  

Things Ep 77 ===

Jeff Kikel: [00:00:00] Hey everyone and welcome  once again to the Cents of things and we are here  

to have a fun time Talking to you a little bit  about business talking to you about the markets  

and talking to you a little bit About what’s going  on. This episode today, I want to start us off and  

tell you a little bit about some fun business  names, best business names I could find today.

Jeff Kikel: And of course, we just saw the end  of the the hurricane and Hurricane Milton that  

just burst across Florida. Those folks are,  getting through this right now. They’ve just  

been through Hale, through Helene a couple  of weeks ago. But what I wanted to do,  

of course, all these times that we  see these types of things, of course,  

everybody’s agenda comes out and I wanted  to give you some real data to talk about.

Jeff Kikel: So we’re going to talk about  that a little bit today. So hang on,  

we’ll be right back in just a second.

[00:01:00]

Jeff Kikel:  

Hey, everybody. Welcome back. It’s Jeff and  Ron here again. Hey, Ron, how you doing, bud?

Ron Lang: Good morning. Never a dull day, as  we like to say. Plenty of news between the  

hurricane, as you were talking about, and  everything that’s going on in the market.

Ron Lang: And Obviously what’s  coming up here in November.

Jeff Kikel: Absolutely. Yeah. We’ve got  what, 27 days to the election. We’ve got  

another fed rate cut, maybe happening in  the future here. We don’t know what that’s  

going to look like. Inflation numbers were eh  today. So everything is just a little I just  

say it’s eh at this point but the market keeps  creeping its way up, climbing a wall of worry.

Ron Lang: Again, all the core  economic indicators are heading  

down other than inflation and  the market we’re at all time  

highs basically. So I don’t quite the  conundrum [00:02:00] and quite scary

Jeff Kikel: at the same time to the answer when I  get asked is we keep working. Then we keep working  

with what we have, which is the market’s  climbing the wall of worry at this point.

Jeff Kikel: That’s all I can tell you. And  we’ll go from there. Agree. What do you  

got for us? Let’s kick off with the best  business names. I’m going to do this in  

a David Letterman countdown mode. All right. So  best business names. Number nine, going postal.  

They sell guns of us who grew up in the the 1980s.

Jeff Kikel: This means a lot. Going postal,  that’s the name of their business. Love it.  

All right. Number eight, Sam and Ella’s chicken  palace. So I’m not sure if I really want to show  

up to this place called Salmonella’s, but and  I love it. The chicken palace plus pizza and  

subs and everything else. I originally  typed it as Salmonella’s pizza and subs.

Jeff Kikel: And then I [00:03:00] looked down  and saw chicken palace there. So I had to go  

back and pull it up. So just I don’t know if  I can stomach salmonella jitters, coffee shop,  

probably the most straightforward name to  you, actually. I like that. I thought it was

Ron Lang: great.

Jeff Kikel: It’s just, that’s like naming a

Ron Lang: comedy club.

Ron Lang: Chuckles.

Jeff Kikel: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.  Laffos or something. Number six,  

pass more gas and propane. It’s  just an unfortunate place to have a,  

to be located in the town of Passmore and  own the gas company that’s there. But just,  

I went to high school with a guy  with that last name. I really didn’t

Ron Lang: associate all that together.

Ron Lang: Ah,

Jeff Kikel: if you put the two together,  once again, these are the unfortunate  

names. There’ll be another additional  unfortunate name coming down the road here,  

just outta curiosity, is that in the same  town as the b and m baked beans? I think  

so. Yes it is. It’s right next to b  and m. Baked beans at Passmore gas.

Jeff Kikel: Very nice. Am I gone?  Funeral [00:04:00] home perfectly. One,  

I would say, I hope you are if you’re there,  

am I gone? I think perfect name. This is a  fortunate business name when it comes to,

Ron Lang: and I heard working there  is a real dead end job. So it really

Jeff Kikel: is a dead end job.

Jeff Kikel: It’s in, it goes along with how many  people are dead in the cemetery. Hopefully all  

of them. All right, here’s the tobacco  and beer place called chewing butts. It,  

it looks like it’s out west. It’s  chewing butts, discount tobacco and beer.

Jeff Kikel: Number three, the most  creative name on this whole thing,  

Tequila Mockingbird. I don’t know what  they do. I am assuming that’s pretty good.

Ron Lang: That’s pretty awesome.

Jeff Kikel: I think it is the greatest name.  It’s the most creative one on this whole list.  

Number two, the most unfortunate name because  this person didn’t have control over this.

Jeff Kikel: Cause this is his name. Stubbs  prosthetics and orthotics may have thought  

to [00:05:00] go into a different business than  this, Hey, whatever. Listen, when he was born,  

he was probably ordained to go in  that business. It pretty much was.  

And it may be a family business for many  years. And number one STD contractors.

Jeff Kikel: Now this is not. Unfortunate it is  not creative. This is just a stupid name. Hey,  

listen, the three owners could have been  Steve, Tom and Dave. We don’t know. Very  

well could be. And nobody thought to  put all that together as one word,  

or maybe switch it around a little  bit, but they are the STD contracts.

Jeff Kikel: Very nice. Very nice. Wow. So  Milton and Helene go away. It’s interesting  

to see the response between the two. I know  the North Carolina governor is getting a  

lot of flack. For all this stuff going on  and it is a horrible thing. Don’t get me  

wrong. I come from Western North Carolina.  So I know what the territory is like there  

and you just don’t expect a hurricane to  come and park on [00:06:00] top of you.

Jeff Kikel: And that in that territory, you’ve  got a lot of rural population in the area that  

it hit and it is horrible. And, yes. The governor  kind of got caught flatfooted. FEMA really monkey  

this thing up bad mainly because they’re  trying to deal with multiple hurricanes and  

all kinds of stuff all over the country not  defending them by any way, shape, or form.

Jeff Kikel: But that was a real weird one. Helene  just cutting up the middle. You see the opposite,  

Florida was really prepared for Milton. They  just had Helene whipped through a few weeks  

ago. But you just see that, places that are used  to this, they can get ahead of the game so much,  

they really were prepared and, I think they’ll  be able to get in, get Florida back on, on track.

Jeff Kikel: North Carolina, Western Kentucky  or Eastern Kentucky, Tennessee. It’s going  

to be a while before they get back up and  running because there’s just not a lot of  

stuff to go there and fix the problem. I  think. [00:07:00] What I see out of this,  

every time I see this, then I start  to hear the politicians and people,  

oh this is the worst hurricane  season we’ve seen ever and all that.

Jeff Kikel: And I’m a data guy. Most of you  know that I watch this. I am a big data guy.  

I need data and I need to understand things.  So I just actually Google search, history of  

hurricanes. And I came up with this from The  National Hurricane Center. And what it does  

is it breaks down by decade how many, hurricanes  we had total, how many major hurricanes we’ve had.

Jeff Kikel: And, what I’ve heard so much of is, oh  my God, since 2000, it’s been worse than anything.  

It really hasn’t. If you look back in history the  1870s through really the beginning of the 1920s,  

And even into the forties and fifties, we  had more hurricanes then. And the decade  

41 to 50 during world war [00:08:00] II, of  course we were fighting a war, so it really,  

people didn’t really think about this, but  10 major hurricanes during that decade.

Jeff Kikel: When we look  at our most recent decade,  

we’ve had four major hurricanes and really  for the last years, we’ve had not as m

Jeff Kikel: And a show, I think  it was a few years back. It was  

something talking about hurricanes  and they were making the point that  

we, we had a big period of time where we had  major hurricanes and then we started to not  

see as many for a while. And what has happened is,  and this is what happened with Superstorm Sandy.

Jeff Kikel: Is for years, people have been  building closer and closer and closer because  

we didn’t have these major arcane’s right.  And now, as they’re picking up again, boom,  

these places are getting destroyed that are  built literally right on the sand. If you  

looked at this, back in the [00:09:00]  50s, you didn’t have all these major.

Jeff Kikel: Hotels, you didn’t  have houses and all that were  

literally built right on the water. At that point.

Ron Lang: I was looking that the  most expensive hurricanes and storms,  

and they said, Katrina, I think that  was an old five was the most expensive

Jeff Kikel: hands down the most expensive.  Cause that thing, it was partly the hurricane,  

but it was also partly, it was a  major part was the infrastructure,  

which was so behind the times, and that  was a combination of both the people.

Jeff Kikel: The leadership in New Orleans and a  failure of the army corps of engineers. To really  

keep up that, the machinery of that. And that,  the reason it was so extensive was the bursting  

of the levees and stuff like that. It wasn’t  necessarily the hurricane, the winds and all that.

Jeff Kikel: It was the water afterwards.  In the most recent. Few years,  

we’ve had Ian and Ida. So about one of  these big, things per year this year,  

we’ve had a couple [00:10:00] in one  year. So I think they’re going to be  

big going back in time. The most, the, another  biggie was of course, 2012, Sandy on the east.

Jeff Kikel: That was

Ron Lang: up by me when I was  in Jersey, that was brutal.

Jeff Kikel: Yeah. And like I said, I think a  lot of it is people got complacent. And kept  

building closer and closer. And you go to some  of these places and because you live there,  

you go to some of these places  and literally their house is  

built where part of the day water  is lapping up underneath the house.

Jeff Kikel: Any form of storm surge  is going to wash that out even worse.

Ron Lang: Yeah. And I remember Andrew, I had  friends that were in South Florida and I remember,  

I think went through Miami university, went  through all that area and just. communities.

Jeff Kikel: And for me, growing up in North  Carolina and then going back and when I was  

doing my internship in college with my national  fraternity, that’s right when Hugo had hit.

Jeff Kikel: And I remember, I came  back [00:11:00] After Hugo and did  

my internship and I remember, Charlotte,  which is way inland. Charlotte. Literally,  

all the pine trees were just flat  in there and then 1 of the guys  

that I met during that trip. Was a was  the dean of the college of Charleston.

Jeff Kikel: And we stayed at his house and he was  like yeah, when Hugo hit, my house was like five  

feet to the right of here at that point. Cause  it got completely lifted off of its foundation  

and moved. And this was probably a 4, 000  square foot house. That just got moved  

around by the water. These things are bad and  it, I’m not meaning to downplay any of this,  

but the reality is, yes, it’s costly because  stuff costs a lot more now to rebuild,

Ron Lang: But just materials alone, materials

Jeff Kikel: and finding the labor  to go in and fix these things.

Jeff Kikel: I think you’ll always find  the labor. It’s the materials that are  

the tough part. That’s exactly right. But the  problem is when these type of things happen,  

it’s [00:12:00] finding the labor that knows what  they’re doing. You can find labor that’s just  

complete garbage that’s out there and then  getting the materials and everything else.

Jeff Kikel: That’s what’s costing  so much. But it’s, Stop. Yeah,  

what I would say is stop listening to all  the pundits who are talking about. Oh,  

it’s different now and things have changed. Ron  and I know from, being in the financial industry,  

every time we hear, oh, it’s different  or it’s the same or it’s different.

Jeff Kikel: Now, it usually is neither. At  that point, that’s my little that’s maybe

Ron Lang: different but it’s similar.

Jeff Kikel: It’s

Ron Lang: similar

Jeff Kikel: Yeah, so I you know Once again,  I take a look at this stuff and I like to  

look at data And the data tells me that it’s  not necessarily any worse. It’s just some of  

these are a lot more expensive and we  hadn’t experienced big hurricanes for  

a while But in the past we experienced  a heck of a lot of them And there was  

not as robust of an insurance industry  back then You To to [00:13:00] come in?

Ron Lang: No. And I the only worst thing  I’ve gotta deal with here is monsoon  

season in the, yeah. August, September  timeframe, which , I was gonna say  

it is for a few nonstop hundred degrees. Certainly  not what they’re experiencing in the Gulf.

Jeff Kikel: Yeah, no, the nonstop a  hundred degrees for several months.

Jeff Kikel: But yeah. It’s just. You know  what you’re getting where you’re at that  

point. Like I said, once again we’re there for  all you guys. I made some donations here to  

the relief efforts there because I just believe  that we’ve got to help them as much as we can.  

And that gets volunteers and, faith  based organizations and everybody  

else in there to help out because  the government can’t do everything.

Jeff Kikel: And they typically don’t do  it very well when they do. That’s all  

I had for today. I want to thank you guys for  watching. Please share this with your friends,  

make sure you subscribe to the channel and  we will be back with you the very next time.

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