A friend of mine: 
Any time you think that the government employs people who are in any way cognizant of reality…remember this: High ranking Obomba economic adviser claims tsunami could “temporarily boost” the japanese and global economy. Broken window fallacy…did anyone fail to learn this in econ 101? if you burn down your house and have to build another, are you better off? 
Tsunami an economic disaster? Not necessarily
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The natural disaster of a tsunami could actually provide a temporary boost to the global economy.
Larry Summers, former director of President Obama’s economic council and a former head of the World Bank, said rebuilding could temporarily boost the Japanese economy.
Summers suggested this in an interview Friday on CNBC. He added that the global economy is more resilient than most people think.
In Hawaii, disruptive weather events are good for some businesses but bad for others.
Stores that sell generators and hardware supplies experience a run on these items when a tsunami or bad weather approach; other retailers find their usual sales interrupted as people focus on evacuating and stockpiling essential supplies instead of their usual shopping.
HawaiiNewsNow correspondent Tannya Joaquin found three gas stations that had run out of fuel more than an hour before the first harbor wave was to have arrived.
The tsunami is an expense item for hotels, which have extensive plans in place to take care of guests’ needs, usually through “vertical evacuation,” escorting guests at least three stories up. Much of the expense comes from bringing in extra people to take care of guests. (from hawaiinewsnow.com)
Larry Summers needs to take a break from corrupting the minds of Harvard students and see what the outside of classroom looks like. He can start by reading this:
Natural Disasters, It Turns Out, Are Bad
It seems that we may never rid ourselves of the broken-window fallacy.
Hurricane Katrina certainly did not stop economists from proclaiming the silver lining of natural disasters. On September 9, 2005, Labor Secretary Elaine Chao told USA Today that demand could create a labor shortage that could push up wage rates and that “We’re going to see a tremendous boom in construction.” On December 3rd, 2005, Nigel Gault, chief domestic economist at Global Insight, said, “We are now at the point where Hurricane Katrina’s effects are adding to job creation rather than detracting from it.”
And it’s not only that disasters just have a silver lining: economists have long believed that natural disasters and wars are actually good for the economy! Until recently they have not made any attempt to empirically test their views. However, in 2002 Mark Skidmore and Hideki Toya published a paper where they found a positive correlation between disasters and human capital, productivity, and GDP growth.
Now the good news. A recently published paper in Economic Inquiry by Cuaresma, Hlouskova, and Obersteiner brings the positive benefits of disasters into question. Not only does it counter the silver lining of new construction jobs, it also finds that disasters actually subtract from economic performance. In addition the paper provides clues to the entire confusion over this issue.
Economists have generally rested their case for the benefits of disasters on “creative destruction,” but our authors are quick to point out that Schumpeter’s view of creative destruction is one that is driven by competition, where those associated with disasters are not; they are just destruction. (Read more from mises.org)