September 11th, 2001 I was outside talking on the cell with my grandmother. The sun was just barely peaking over our rooftop when my husband yelled at me from the kitchen that the World Trade Center was under attack. We sat in stunned silence memorized by the real time horror unfolding before our eyes on our own television. We were jarred back into our reality by the ringing phone and the need to wake the boys. This was what our grandparents and great-grandparents experienced when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Our own parents had this dire feeling of uncertainty that followed President Kennedy's and Martin Luther King's assassinations.
My son said I was being a drama queen. Do I go to work? Do I stay home? What will happen next? He said get over it, life will go on. And as always, it did.
The goal behind the attacks was to destroy our economic core, Wall Street, and collapse our great country into irrevocable chaos. Economically the reverse occurred. Our world in 2003 entered into wealthiest, monied time in global history. Our leaders turned a blind eye to the deregulation and the exuberance in the banking and lending industry. The United States was getting their own revenge.
But revenge is best served cold. We allowed the heat to keep cranking with our own home grown devices until we blew up the financial markets by our own hand. Terrorism has many masters.
And again, the soothsayers and prophets of doom got it wrong. We are coming out of the worst financial meltdown on record. After one year, our economy is showing signs of stability in virtually all categories. We are still fragile, with unemployment looming over the recovery but we are healing at an astonishing rate. Banks will still fail, but those are already on the Fed hit list. The housing market is in fluctuation but seems to be recovering. Hey, we all need a place to live. Buyers of mortgages back securities that fled the markets a year ago have reentered and have tentatively began purchasing again. Our leaders are not perfect and they will argue into infinity the correct tweaking of the right and wrong of our economy. That plan is the model that the majority of the countries in the world wish they had followed. It gives us all the right to be drama queens even if it isn't just about us.
FYI: How about those interest rates! Rumor has it that we may see the rates fall over the next couple of weeks, mainly because investors, other than the U. S. Treasury, have reappeared and are buying the 10 year bonds. Stay tuned.
By Diane Gerdes The "Economy Cupcake"
Comments(0)