Boston Shutdown Cost $333 Million for One Day

Blind panics are expensive

Much of the Boston area has been shut down to facilitate the manhunt for Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. (Although Dunkin' Donuts (DNKN), a Boston institution, has remained open at police request to serve emergency response personnel.) While that may be necessary as a security precaution, it carries an economic cost. A pretty steep one, according to Jim Diffley, a vice president and chief economist at IHS Global Insight (IHS). The Boston metro area is the country's ninth-largest and has an economy bigger than that of Greece, Singapore, Portugal, or Ireland, according to the Fiscal Times.

"Boston is a $1 billion-a-day metropolitan area," Diffley says. "But all that economic activity doesn't all go away due to the shutdown—because of telecommuting, because of information technology, a lot more of it can go on than used to be the case. Some of that activity is simply deferred until tomorrow or next week or whenever the guy is caught. Think of things like groceries and cars. You can purchase those later. So a lot of that activity is simply shifted in time."