As Wall Street prepared to reopen Monday, President George W. Bush and other US leaders tried to keep up investors' spirits amid fears last week's terrorist attacks against the United States would further weaken the global economy.
Some of America's biggest brand names announced they would buy back shares in their own companies when trading resumed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time in nearly a week.
Trading was halted on Wall Street Tuesday, when two hijacked airlines smashed into the nearby World Trade Center Tuesday, collapsing its twin towers.
In middle America, messages flying across the Internet urged "buy, buy, buy" to keep the US economy from collapsing as well.
Warren Buffett, one of America's biggest single investors in the world's most important stock market and one who has the most to lose if it goes into free-fall, said bluntly: "I won't be selling."
Yet some doom sayers in the financial industry believed the market was opening too soon and predicted that the Dow Jones index -- the barometer of America's economic health -- would plummet in the opening minutes.
Early trading on foreign markets did not bode well for Wall Street however.
Stock markets in Asia fell sharply and European indices wavered Monday. The stock market in Istanbul, Turkey, for example, slumped 10.1 percent in morning trading. Stocks in New Zealand fell nearly five percent in early trading, while shares in Hong Kong closed 3.5 percent lower.
Returning to Washington from Camp David Sunday, President George W. Bush expressed his "great faith in the resiliency of the economy.
"No question about it, this incident affected our economy," he said. "But the markets open tomorrow, people go back to work, and we'll show the world."
Drug manufacturer Pfizer, one of the biggest companies in the United States, set the tone of corporate America with a pledge to go on with the five-billion dollar stock buyback program it launched in June as the nation's economy was faltering.
John Chambers, president and chief executive officer of computer network company Cisco Systems, which is buying back up to three billion dollars of its own stock over the next two years, said this was because his company has "tremendous confidence in the financial systems of our country".
Buffett was echoed by Jack Welch, who has stepped down from two decades at the helm of America's biggest company, General Electric.
"Where else would you go with your money?" Welch asked.
But Buffett also conceded that his company Berkshire Hathaway, whose empire extends to re-insurance, would have to pay out a "great deal of money -- more than with any other catastrophe" -- following the destruction of the World Trade Center that left some 5,000 people missing and presumed dead.
Financial analysts said they would be closely watching what the big guns of the industry will do Monday -- companies like Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and also Morgan Stanley, most of whose 3,500 employees in the World Trade Center were lucky to escape.
"You're damn right this firm is going to come back," Merrill Lynch chief executive David Komansky said in a statement to The New York Times.
"This place did not get to be what it is by having a bunch of pussycats here."
The Dow stood at 9605.51 before Tuesday's terrorist strikes forced its longest closure since World War I.
This already represents a fall of nearly 11 per cent for the year, and some analysts fear it could fall as much again in early trading, especially if investors bail out of shares in airlines, insurance and other companies hit hard by the attacks.
One local broker predicted the worst: "Nine thousand, 8,000, 7,000 -- the bottom's the limit," said one local broker on condition of anonymity, for fear of being branded a panic monger.
A report released Monday in Singapore showed just how closely eyes are trained on Wall Street and on possible retaliation by the United States for the terrorist strikes.
Southeast Asia's biggest banking group said the global economy faces the spectre of a depression amid US threats to punish those responsible for the attacks on New York and Washington.
"The attacks have substantially raised the recession risk in the US," DBS Bank said in a weekly report which painted a grim picture of the Asian region's prospects in the near term.
"And with other major economies like Japan and Euroland already in recession or hardly growing, this could tip the world into a global depression," it said.
Any military strikes ordered by US President George W. Bush would inevitably affect oil prices and with most major economies struggling, a rise in crude prices could bring them closer to a depression, the bank said.
Representatives of the city's police and fire services will join top politicians Monday in the time-honored tradition of ringing the bell to mark the start of trade on the New York exchange.
Monday's bell also will honor the victims of history's worst terrorist attack.
The opening bell will be followed by two minutes of silence, after which traders will sing "God Bless America” -- NEW YORK (AFP)
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
