Maybe more than we think. I was very encouraged yesterday by how well my kids coped without their usual forms of entertainment as Sandy stripped away 100 years of technological progress in minutes – and we're still without power this morning in northern NJ.
While we have yet to be forced to hunt our own food, it's interesting to see how many things in our home become instantly useless without electricity. Even the design is poor as our heat, for example, relies on an electric control to turn on – so we all gathered by the fire, which we were lucky to have.
Overall, it looks like the storm did about $20Bn in damage and that may sound like a lot but there are a lot of insurers who were priced for worse, so well be looking at that space tomorrow, when the markets reopen and the 21st century is restored.
Asian markets pulled back a bit as stimulus out of Japan was less than hoped for and stimulus from China is also getting routine. Europe is turning up a bit this morning despite rising German Unemployment or, maybe, because of it because something has to convince them that austerity is not a solution.
