O’Neill Was ‘Holding My Breath’ as Markets Opened After 9/11
Paul O’Neill remembers feeling a little short of oxygen at the New York Stock Exchange as the market prepared to open six days after the Sept. 11 attacks.
“I have to tell you I was holding my breath that we weren’t going to blow the fuses,” O’Neill, the Treasury secretary from January 2001 to December 2002, said in an interview today.
Concern about a possible plunge in stock prices — the Dow Jones Industrial Average ended the day 685 points lower — was secondary to worries that trading systems might not work. “It was functional, which was the point,” he said.
The opening bell on Sept. 17, 2001, was the outcome of efforts by scores of people in and out of government who restored crippled computer networks. For O’Neill, that day capped a weeklong odyssey that cut short meetings with officials in Japan and placed him in the middle of the drive to help Wall Street rebound from the worst terrorist attacks in U.S. history.
As the first plane struck the World Trade Center eight years ago today, O’Neill was settling down in his suite at the Imperial Hotel, in the early evening in Tokyo. He, his staff and reporters covering the trip had just arrived from Beijing, where he met with Chinese officials for talks about the country’s currency policy and other issues.
Tim Adams, O’Neill’s chief of staff, alerted him to the news that a plane had hit one of the towers.
“It was there for us to see” on television, O’Neill said. In a matter of hours, after telephone calls back and forth with the White House, a decision was made that O’Neill would be flown back to Washington in a military plane from the U free instant credit report.S. base at Okinawa, he said.
The next day, as O’Neill’s motorcade left the Imperial Hotel, cooks, housekeepers and waitresses applauded.
Refueling Over Alaska
O’Neill, 73, said the flight was nonstop, refueling in the air over Alaska and landing at Andrews Air Force Base outside the U.S. capital.
“It was eerie,” he said. “You could see that there were no planes on the ramp at National airport and there were no planes in the sky.”
Once back at the Treasury Department, O’Neill said his focus was getting the stock market restarted. The talks included Peter Fisher, the Treasury undersecretary for domestic finance; then-NYSE Chairman Richard Grasso; and Salvatore Sodano, then the chairman of the American Stock Exchange Inc.
“I had endless quick phone calls with Peter Fisher telling me, ‘You’ve got to get the White House to back off, because they’re insisting they want us to open the market tomorrow morning and the computer center in New York is under 30 feet of water,’” he recalled.
More important than the resumption of markets was ensuring the restart wouldn’t fail, he said. “I don’t remember it being a hard sell — I basically said we should not have a failed restart,” he said. “It worked.”