Good morning, New York, we hope you are safe and well. Chasing storm damage: The estimates of $10bn to $20bn for damage caused by hurricane Sandy fall well short of the costs incurred by hurricane Katrina ($113.4bn) and 1992′s hurricane Andrew ($58.6bn), Goldman Sachs" Jan Hatzius says. But it's difficult to know how much to rely on the cost estimates so early on, as Hatzius highlights. Head over to Kate's post for the full analysis. New Barclays investigations: What do you get when you reveal two new regulatory investigations as part of your slightly disappointing quarterly results? One investigation concerns conduct in power trading and the other is on whether the bank's relationships with certain third parties breached corruption rules. More detail in this post. Disney buys Lucasfilm: Mickey Mouse has forged an unlikely alliance with Darth Vader after Walt Disney agreed a $4bn deal to acquire Lucasfilm, the company behind the Star Wars films, and revealed plans to release a seventh movie in the series. The US Nuclear Regulatory Commission said that at all three plants - Unit 1 at the Nine Mile Point facility in New York, Unit 3 at Indian Point, also in New York, and Unit 1 at Salem in New Jersey - "all safety systems responded as designed." Google and Starbucks will be subjected to parliamentary scrutiny over their tax affairs in the UK for the first time on Monday with the public accounts committee set to demand that the two US corporate giants give evidence. UBS layoffs: The Swiss bank sent a shiver through the global financial sector on Tuesday when the Swiss bank started to put bankers on leave on the very day it confirmed one of the most sweeping job cuts in banking in the last decade. Romney ad upsets Chrysler: Mitt Romney's last-minute push to gain traction in the pivotal swing state of Ohio ran into headwinds on Tuesday, with the heads of two large US car companies criticising his claims on the auto industry. An advertisement from the Republican candidate's campaign run on both radio and television this week suggested that Chrysler was preparing to shift production of its Jeep brand from the US to China. Chrysler disputed the veracity of this. Markets: Investor sentiment is being underpinned by a second successive day of mostly better than expected corporate earnings from Asia and Europe, helping to counteract a hitherto generally disappointing US reporting season. Investors will welcome Wall Street back to the trading fold after its two-day closure in the face of hurricane Sandy. But caution is the watchword as political and economic risks loom. The US equity markets shutdown was the longest caused by weather in over a decade. (Financial Times) (Bloomberg)