22nd September 2001 

The predicted "patriotic rally" on the New York stock markets failed to materialize on Monday as they reopened, and the Dow Jones index fell 685 points. By close on Friday, the index had lost one third of its value that amounted to the largest one-week fall since the 1930s. The value wiped off shares since Monday amounts to more than $1 trillion.

An interesting article on www.markethistory.com draws parallels between current events and 1920 when on September 16^th a bomb exploded outside the New York Stock Exchange killing 30 people and injuring hundreds more. At that time, an economic downturn had already led to a 22% fall in the markets and the explosion, said to be the work of "foreign criminals" accentuated the falls which lasted through to the following August. The bull market after August 1921 continued until the market’s peak on September 3^rd 1929, after which the crash of prices plunged the world into the 1930s depression.

This week’s falls saw the Dow Jones lose a total of 1370 points to finish at 8235, and the Nasdaq down 272 to close on 1423.

A package worth $15 billion to assist the airline industry has been agreed and was signed by President Bush today (Saturday). With the U.S. airlines accounting for more than 10% of the gross domestic product, the move is seen as essential to avoid the economic slowdown turning into recession. $5 billion will be distributed as immediate grants to compensate airlines for the grounding of flights, and domestic airlines will be provided with war risk insurance for 180 days.

Businesses across the world were hit further this week with the outbreak of a new computer virus spreading rapidly across the Internet. "Nimda", first seen on Tuesday, brought many corporate networks to a halt as well as slowing areas of the Internet to a point where some systems became unusable. Unlike previous virus outbreaks (or, more technically in this case, "Internet Worm" outbreaks), "Nimda" seems to have been designed more to create network and Internet "traffic" on a colossal scale rather than to damage individual computers or data. Unusually, the virus can spread through open Internet connections as well as by e-mail, and has the ability to create its own user accounts on computer systems and to designate drives that were previously private as shared. Experts believe the outbreak is not over, although the worst damage is now being repaired.

And as a postscript, you may have noticed this week’s News Comment is a little shorter than usual, and I have almost completely avoided the most important topic of the last two weeks’ news.

I think there has been more than enough comment, speculation, opinion and gossip about it elsewhere. On this particular subject I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said over and over again.

Take care, everyone.
And let us all hope our leaders can resolve this with the minimum loss of life – both now and for the future of our world.