World Trade Center: Human cost first, business cost later

It may well be that as news gradually comes out of the US during the next few hours - as day turns to night in Europe - the full extent of the tragedy will leave us even more shocked.

Even given what's known so far, it seems churlish to speak of business and other secondary issues. But speak of the disaster we must, even at a time when we don't know the full story. To do otherwise would be to belittle the severity of what's happened.

What we know in terms of the global economy is that bourses based in Wall Street - the NYSE and Nasdaq - are closed for the day. The London Stock Exchange has been evacuated, and small amounts of trading continues.

We also know prices of key commodities such as oil will go up, and economies teetering between recovery and recession will now have a long way back to any kind of normalcy.

Government workers in the US have been evacuated from their places of employment. In the UK, we have learned some government employees have also been given the option of leaving work early.

We will all remember this day.

And it must be said there is no need to look for tenuous IT angles to make any link between the disaster and the worlds of business and technology.

Of course, the initial attacks were on symbols of western capitalism and government. But we must stress that there are likely to be thousands of workers in the World Trade Center and elsewhere who will be reported as connected to the new economy, whether at branch offices of well-known players or small businesses renting space at a prestigious address.

Stories of the suffering of humans - not businesses, which are easily replaced - will emerge over coming days. It will put much of the rest of the news you read and we write into perspective.