FEBRUARY 18, 2021

It’s a short Wealth Watch this week as I’m in Texas and still without water. Electricity is back on, but who knows for how long.

The market is oversold and due for a pullback, but we believe it should be short lived. However, the freezing weather is really slowing things down. Are markets underestimating the impact of this cold snap rolling across the U.S.? For those of you in the Midwest or in the Northeast, this weather strikes most as nothing out of the ordinary.  For those of us in Texas and Oklahoma though, it is a whole different story. But as we’ve seen, 2020 and 2021 are hardly normal conditions.  

In fact, take a look at some of the headlines from the Washington Post:

– It is so cold in Texas, weather satellites are confused.
– Nissan and Toyota halt production.
– It is colder in Kansas than in Alaska.
– Houston utilities note power out for several days – when was the last time this happened?

In other words, millions of Americans are facing even more suffering, this time from Mother Nature.  But we need to be mindful of this. Power was down for about 500,000 Texas customers as of Thursday morning — way down from the over 3 million outages a day earlier, according to Poweroutage.us. The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which operates the state’s power grid, said in a statement Thursday morning it had made “significant progress” restoring power overnight. 

Stay warm and stay safe.