Do you avoid investing in any companies in the San Francisco area? Just wondering. Do you live anywhere near San Francisco? I believe that there are also risks in the Seattle area (home to Amazon). You can’t avoid everything because of earthquake danger, but a big one would really be devastating, and probably with effects throughout the economy.
I live on the 4th floor of a 4 story old building in San Francisco. I think it was built in the 1920s after the 1906 earthquake.
I don’t avoid investing in companies in San Francisco, in fact, I also have a heavy concentration of investments based in the SF area. I am aware of the risk and I thought I would post about it because I think most investors who don’t live in SF would not even consider this risk.
I agree that a Katrina-like disaster in the SF area would have an effect on the global markets. Some companies that are based in the area:
Google
Apple
Facebook
Uber
Twitter
Gilead
Arista
Nvidia
HP
Agilent
Genentech
Wells Fargo
Charles Schwab
Ebay
Paypal
Tesla
McKesson
Adobe
Salesforce.com
Oracle
Chevron
Clorox
Bio-Rad
Square
and many, many others including several thousand start-ups (BTW, a huge fraction of the world’s venture capital is based here; I heard recently that 50% of the global VC funding went to companies in the SF area)
The paralysis of a major earthquake due to infrastructure damage would certainly have global repercussions.