The Day The Stock Market Didn’t Open
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Sep 11, 2022
I don't often write short posts, but this one qualifies as one of the shortest articles I've written in 16 years.
Photo by Julien Maculan on Unsplash
The date was 9/11/01; the time was 8:46AM. The stock market was supposed to open that day; it didn’t. Other than holidays or weekends, the stock market had never been closed for any other reason. This was the day it all changed.
The stock market stayed closed for days. I don’t think anyone cared. I certainly didn’t care; I doubt the people who worked at the stock market were happy to be away from there. Terrible way to get days off.
If you look back at things, it’s possible that we owe a lot of our financial problems today to that day. Our economy was riding high before that. President Clinton had left us with a wonderful surplus. The stock market was riding high. We hadn’t had a dotcom bust yet. We all believed we would be something big, something special, even if there was still anger at how our election had turned out, not necessarily the choice of the man but the way the Supreme Court got involved.
On this day 21 years ago, we all forgot about that. We didn’t care anymore. But somehow, we knew everything had changed.
And it’s still changing us all today. Peace to you on this day.
It really did change everything, didn’t it?
I wish that the short-term changes – the realization of what mattered most (life, family, kindness) and reaching out to ask strangers, “Are you okay?” and sticking around for the answer, caring about the answer, were the changes that stuck.
I totally agree with you. We were angry for a couple of days, but we were united… which ended quickly once people started going after both Muslims and people they thought were Muslims. It’s a sad state of affairs that indirectly led to what’s going on in the country now, and that’s too bad.