The View | In face of Paris terror attacks -- job of business is to carry on

What is the cost of terrorism? In the aftermath of the recent killings in France, Lebanon and Mali the understandable immediate reaction has been to count the cost in terms of human lives.

Assessing the cost in terms of dollars and cents may appear to be heartless yet the corollary of simply shrugging and saying yes there is an economic price but now is not the time to make this calculation gives succor to the terrorists who yearn to set a highly disruptive agenda and make it hard for business to carry on as usual.

Thankfully this agenda remains largely unrealized because humans are resilient creatures and consistently demonstrate that they have what it takes to pick up the pieces and move on. This is why the terrorist’s worst intentions are thwarted in every store that has reopened in Paris, with every plane departing from Beirut’s international airport and every visitor returning to Mali.

Moreover evidence from more recent large scale terrorist attacks is that people are learning to move on more quickly. Or maybe they have come to understand that terrible as these attacks are they are not going to undermine the fundamental business of business.

Stock markets, in their typically crude way, reflect this thinking. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks US stock exchanges were forced to close and re-opened on September 17. The immediate response was a record plunge of 617 points or 7.1 per cent, there were subsequent dips but by the end of the year the S&P 500 was up by some 5 per cent from its 10 September close.

Terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India (2008), London, UK (2005) and Madrid, Spain (2004) saw the local stock markets react in a similar fashion, although Indian investors were markedly less panicky. What followed was not just share price recovery but market rises within months.

Fast forward to the impact of the terrorist outrage in Paris this month where France’s CAC-40 barely faltered in the immediate aftermath of the attack, Germany’s DAX index actually inched up, while London FTSE-100 slipped 1 per cent. In other words investors kept their heads, understanding that business as usual was not fundamentally undermined by these killings.