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INTRODUCTION
On
On
the afternoon of September 11, 2001, I was flying back to
Washington on Swissair Flight 128, returning home from a routine
international bankers' meeting in Switzerland. I'd been
moving about the cabin when the chief of the security detail that escorted
me on trips abroad, Bob Agnew, stopped me in the aisle. Bob is an ex-Secret
Service man, friendly but not especially talkative. At that moment, he was
looking grim. "Mr. Chairman," he said quietly, "the captain needs to see you
up front. Two planes have flown into the World Trade Center." I must have
had a quizzical look on my face because he added, "I'm not joking."
In the cockpit, the captain appeared quite nervous. He told us there
had been a terrible attack against our country—several airliners had been
hijacked and two flown into the World Trade Center and one into the Pentagon.
Another plane was missing. That was all the information he had, he
said in his slightly accented English. We were returning to Zurich, and he
was not going to announce the reason to the other passengers.
"Do we have to go back?" I asked. "Can we land in Canada?" He said no,
his orders were to head to Zurich.
I went back to my seat as the captain announced that air traffic control
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
had directed us to Zurich. The phones on the seats immediately became
jammed, and I couldn't get through to the ground. The Federal Reserve
colleagues who had been with me in Switzerland that weekend were already
on other flights. So with no way to know how events were developing,
I had nothing to do but think for the next three and a half hours. I
looked out the window, the work I'd brought along, the piles of memos and
economic reports, forgotten in my bag. Were these attacks the beginning of
some wider conspiracy?
My immediate concern was for my wife—Andrea is NBC's chief foreign
affairs correspondent in Washington. She wasn't in New York, which
was one big relief, and visiting the Pentagon hadn't been on her agenda that
day. I assumed she would be at the NBC bureau in the middle of town,
heavily involved in covering the news. So I wasn't deeply worried, I told
myself... but what if she'd gone on a last-minute visit to some general in
the Pentagon?
I worried about my colleagues at the Federal Reserve. Were they safe?
And their families? The staff would be scrambling to respond to the crisis.
This attack—the first on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor—would throw the
country into turmoil. The question I needed to focus on was whether the
economy would be damaged.
The possible economic crises were all too evident. The worst, which I
thought highly unlikely, would be a collapse of the financial system. The
Federal Reserve is in charge of the electronic payment systems that transfer
more than $4 trillion a day in money and securities between banks all over
the country and much of the rest of the world.
We'd always thought that if you wanted to cripple the U.S. economy,
you'd take out the payment systems. Banks would be forced to fall back on
inefficient physical transfers of money. Businesses would resort to barter
and IOUs; the level of economic activity across the country could drop like
a rock.
During the cold war, as a precaution against nuclear attack, the Federal
Reserve had built a large number of redundancies into the communication
and computer facilities on which the money system relies. We have all sorts
of safeguards so that, for example, the data of one Federal Reserve bank are
backed up at another Federal Reserve bank hundreds of miles away or in
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I NTRODUCTION
some remote location. In the event of a nuclear attack, we'd be back up and
running in all nonirradiated areas very quickly This system was the one
Roger Ferguson, the vice chairman of the Fed, would be calling on this day
I was confident that he and our colleagues would be taking the necessary
steps to keep the world dollar system flowing.
Yet even as I thought about it, I doubted that physically disrupting the
financial system was what the hijackers had in mind. Much more likely, this
was meant to be a symbolic act of violence against capitalist America—like
the bomb in the parking garage of the World Trade Center eight years earlier.
What worried me was the fear such an attack would create—especially
if there were additional attacks to come. In an economy as sophisticated as
ours, people have to interact and exchange goods and services constantly,
and the division of labor is so finely articulated that every household depends
on commerce simply to survive. If people withdraw from everyday
economic life—if investors dump their stocks, or businesspeople back away
from trades, or citizens stay home for fear of going to malls and being exposed
to suicide bombers—there's a snowball effect. It's the psychology
that leads to panics and recessions. A shock like the one we'd just sustained
could cause a massive withdrawal from, and major contraction in, economic
activity. The misery could multiply.
Long before my flight touched down, I'd concluded that the world was
about to change in ways that I could not yet define. The complacency we
Americans had embraced for the decade following the end of the cold war
had just been shattered.
We finally reached Zurich just after 8:30 p.m. local time—still early
afternoon in the United States. Swiss banking officials met me as I got off
the plane and rushed me to a private room in the departure lounge. They
offered to show videos of the Twin Towers coming down and the fires at
the Pentagon, but I declined. I'd worked in the neighborhood of the World
Trade Center for much of my life and had friends and acquaintances there.
I assumed the death tolls would be horrendous and would include people
I knew. I didn't want to see the destruction. I just wanted a phone that
worked.
I finally reached Andrea on her cell phone a few minutes before nine,
and it was a great relief to hear her voice. Once we'd assured each other we
3
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
were okay, she told me she had to rush: she was on the set, about to go on
the air with an update of the day's events. I said, "Just tell me quickly
what's happening there."
She was holding the cell phone to one ear while the special-events
producer in New York was on her earpiece in the other ear, almost shouting,
"Andrea, Tom Brokaw is coming to you! Are you ready?" All she had time
to say was, "Listen up." With that, she put the open cell phone on her lap
and addressed the cameras. I heard exactly what America was hearing at
that point—that the missing United Flight 93 had crashed in Pennsylvania.
I was then able to get a call through to Roger Ferguson at the Fed. We
ran through our crisis-management checklist, and just as I'd figured, he had
things well in hand. Then, with all civilian air travel to the United States
shut down, I contacted Andy Card, the White House chief of staff, to request
transportation back to Washington. Finally I went back to the hotel,
escorted by my security detail, to get some sleep and await instructions.
By daybreak I was airborne again, on the flight deck of a United States
Air Force KC-10 tanker—it may have been the only aircraft available. The
crew was used to flying refueling sorties over the North Atlantic. The mood
in the cockpit was somber: "You'll never believe this," the captain said. "Listen."
I put my ear to the headset but couldn't hear anything other than
static. "Normally the North Atlantic is full of radio chatter," he explained.
"This silence is eerie." Apparently nobody else was out there.
As we came down the eastern seaboard and entered prohibited U.S.
airspace, we were met and escorted by a couple of Fl 6 fighters. The captain
got permission to fly over what had been the site of the Twin Towers at the
southern tip of Manhattan, now a smoking ruin. For decades, my offices
had never been more than a few blocks from there; during the late 1960s
and early 1970s I had watched day by day as the Twin Towers went up.
Now, from thirty-five thousand feet, their smoky wreckage was New York's
most visible landmark.
I went straight to the Fed that afternoon, driven with a police escort
through barricaded streets. Then we went to work.
For the most part, the electronic flows of funds were doing fine. But
with civilian air traffic shut down, the transportation and clearing of good
old-fashioned checks were being delayed. That was a technical problem—a
4
I NTRODUCTION
substantial one, but one that the staff and the individual Federal Reserve
banks were entirely capable of handling by temporarily extending additional
credit to commercial banks.
I spent most of my time in the days that followed watching and listening
for signs of a catastrophic economic slowdown. For seven months before
9/11, the economy had been in a very minor recession, still shaking off
the effects of the dot-com crash of 2000. But things had started to turn
around. We had rapidly been lowering interest rates, and the markets were
beginning to stabilize. By late August public interest had shifted from the
economy to Gary Condit, the California congressman whose less-thanforthcoming
statements about a missing young woman dominated the
nightly news. Andrea couldn't get on the air with anything of global significance,
and I remember thinking how incredible that seemed—the world
must be in pretty good shape if the TV news focused mainly on domestic
scandal. Within the Fed, the biggest issue we faced was how far to lower interest
rates.
After 9/11, the reports and statistics streaming in from the Federal Reserve
banks told a very different story. The Federal Reserve System consists
of twelve banks strategically situated around the country Each one lends
money to and regulates the banks in its region. The Federal Reserve banks
also serve as a window on the American economy—officers and staff stay
constantly in touch with bankers and businesspeople in their districts, and
the information they glean about orders and sales beats official published
data by as much as a month.
What they were telling us now was that all across the country people
had stopped spending on everything except items bought in preparation
for possible additional attacks: sales of groceries, security devices, bottled
water, and insurance were up; the whole travel, entertainment, hotel, tourism,
and convention business was down. We knew the shipping of fresh
vegetables from the West Coast to the East Coast would be disrupted by
the suspension of air freight, but we were somewhat surprised by how
quickly many other businesses were hit. For example, the flow of auto parts
from Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit's plants slowed to a crawl at the river
crossings that join the two cities—a factor in the decision by Ford Motor to
shut down temporarily five of its factories. Years earlier, many manufactur
es
THE AGE OF TURBULENCE
ers had shifted to "just-in-time" production—instead of stockpiling parts
and supplies at the plant, they relied on air freight to deliver critical components
as they were needed. The shutdown of the airspace and the tightening
of borders led to shortages, bottlenecks, and canceled shifts.
In the meantime, the U.S. government had gone into high gear. On Friday,
September 14, Congress passed an initial emergency appropriation of
$40 billion and authorized the president to use force against the "nations,
organizations, or persons" who had attacked us. President Bush rallied the
nation with what will likely go down as the most effective speech of his
presidency. "America was targeted for attack because we're the brightest
beacon for freedom and opportunity in the world," he said. "And no one
will keep that light from shining." His approval ratings soared to 86 percent,
and politics, if only for a short period, became bipartisan. Lots of ideas
were being floated on Capitol Hill for helping the nation bounce back.
There were plans that involved pumping funds into airlines, tourism, and
recreation. There was a raft of proposals to extend tax breaks to businesses
in order to encourage capital investment. Terrorism insurance was much
discussed—how do you insure against such catastrophic events, and what
role, if any, does the government have in that?
I thought it urgent to get commercial aircraft flying again, in order to
abort all the negative ripple effects. (Congress quickly passed a $15 billion
air transport rescue bill.) But beyond that, I paid less attention to most of
these debates, because I was intent on getting the larger picture—which
still wasn't clear to me. I was convinced that the answer would not lie in
big, hasty, expensive gestures. It's typical that in times of great national urgency,
every congressman feels he has to put out a bill; presidents feel the
pressure to act too. Under those conditions you can get shortsighted, ineffective,
often counterproductive policies, like the gasoline rationing that
President Nixon imposed during the first OPEC oil shock in 1973. (That
policy caused gas lines in some parts of the country that fall.) But with
fourteen years under my belt as Fed chairman, I'd seen the economy pull
through a lot of crises—including the largest one-day crash in the history of
the stock market, which happened five weeks after I took the job. We'd
survived the real-estate boom and bust of the 1980s, the savings and loan
crisis, and the Asian financial upheavals, not to mention the recession of
6
I NTRODUCTION
1990. We'd enjoyed the longest stock-market boom in history and then
