Wall Street is getting back to work.
Trading resumed on the New York Stock Exchange Wednesday after being closed for two days, the first double-day weather-related closure since 1888, because of Hurricane Sandy. Mayor Bloomberg ran the opening bell.
The exchange is running on backup generators since power is out in large parts of downtown Manhattan.
The closing of the New York Stock Exchange for two days gave some traders the jitters, the exchange’s chief operating officer said today.
“I think many people were a little bit quesy,” said COO Larry Leibowitz. “There was a lot of news in the (last two) days and certainly a lot of news about destruction to people’s homes and infrastructure. But I think getting the markets open helps a lot of that.”
Contrary to some reports, he said water did not seep into the exchange.
“We had no water in this building, contrary to some tweets,” Leibowitz reported. “Water stopped nearly two blocks from this building.”
The exchange is operating on generators that kicked in Sunday. Each has about 40 hours worth of fuel, so they’ve been refilled twice so far.
Staffers stayed around the clock to put a contingency plan into effect.
Leibowitz said the exchange was mindful that many of its clients are operating out of disaster zones.
Several financial firms have data centers at 55 Water Street, which is flooded, he said. The exchange itself has offices at 100 Wall Street, which are also out of commission.
Carpools and other transportation were arranged to insure essential personnel could get in.
With many garages under water downtown, the city lifted some street parking restrictions for exchange employees.
Leibowitz surmised that the impact of the closing on stock prices would be minimal.
“Honestly, I don’t think it will,” he said.
“Look, there are certain stocks that are going to be affected — insurance companies, as the estimates of losses grow. That might have an impact there. Look, there’s five days worth of news from Friday until this morning so a lot of that is going to get absorbed this morning. It’s also a month end, for which a lot of mutual funds matters.”
Even with all that’s happened, Leibowitz ruled out the possibility of moving the trading floor to higher ground.
“I think we are going to work better and better to preventing closures,” he said. “Now, we’re not going to move this trading floor. It is an iconic building. But you could imagine scenarios where we can’t open the trading floor but we should open the market and we do have those scenarios.
“We could actually have implemented it Monday or Tuesday, but so many people would have been in so many different places. It would be different if we had a problem but the rest of the city was fine. The whole tri state area was so blitzed, the risk of doing that (was too great).”
With AP