The Dividend Cafe - The Economic Heart of the Matter in the 9/11 Attacks

Episode Date: September 12, 2025

Today's Post - https://bahnsen.co/3VhbwZZ Unveiling the Economic Impact and Symbolism of 9/11 In this episode of Dividend Cafe, airing on September 12, David L. Bahnsen delves into a unique discussion on the economic intentions behind the 9/11 attacks, emphasizing the attackers' desire to undermine American financial markets by targeting the World Trade Center. The episode explores the symbolic and literal significance of the attacks, draws on historical quotes from Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and highlights America’s resilience and the importance of defending robust capital markets. Key points include the historical context of the World Trade Center, the immediate financial aftermath of the attacks, and the enduring strength of America's economic system. David also ties this discussion into the broader narrative of American exceptionalism and the philosophical importance of free enterprise. 00:00 Introduction and Theme Announcement 00:44 Reflecting on 9/11's Economic Impact 04:33 Historical Context of the World Trade Center 05:58 Financial Institutions in the World Trade Center 08:37 The Jihadist Economic Agenda 14:35 Resilience of American Financial Markets 17:33 American Exceptionalism and Capital Markets 21:50 Conclusion and Gratitude Links mentioned in this episode: DividendCafe.com TheBahnsenGroup.com

Welcome to the Dividend Cafe, weekly market commentary focused on dividends in your portfolio and dividends in your understanding of economic life. Hello and welcome to this Friday's Dividend Cafe. It is September the 12th, and I have intended all week, and actually I think I began planning this a few weeks ago, to do a 9-11-th themed Dividend Cafe today. that is what I'm going to do. And it's a little different of a twist than you might be expecting. It's not a regular memorialization or eulogy around 9-11. The paying respects of those whose lives were lost on 9-11 is something I hope we all do a lot. And it's something I've done over the years.

And I've personally talked about 9-11 in some past dividend cafes. But I have a little different plan for today that's more specific to the economic nature of what I believe was intended in that horrific terror attack. I hesitated a little bit this week to go forward to this theme. The assassination of Charlie Kirk, who some of you may not know who he was, I promise you if you don't, your kids and grandkids likely do, but it is regardless of one's political affiliation, regardless of one's personal opinions. It was a major event and there's a lot that can be said about what it's done to my own mood, but also I think the mood and tenor of the country right now, what it not only is done for it, but what it reflects about it. There's also even apart from that kind of awful

tragedy that took place this week, there's a lot of other economic news and things that I could do a dividend cafe about in the inflation data and the jobs data, the state of the current economy, updated perspective on tariffs. There's a lot of moving parts right now. And some of those things, by the way, I will be talking about on Monday in the dividend cafe with some more particular granularity about inflation and so forth. But no, as we sit here the day after the 24th anniversary of the 9-11 moment in our country, I do want to go forward with what my plan topic was. And I think that there is a vital message in better understanding one element of the 9-11 attacks that is very pertinent to investors, very pertinent to economic actors, that gets to a little

bit more philosophical understanding, which was a topic of Dividend Cafe last week, the way we think about our economy itself and our financial markets here in this country. I talked last week about how we as American investors have had a particular American advantage that is rooted to a distinctly successful implementation of an ideological framework for free enterprise. And part of the secret sauce of America's economic prosperity has been that framework, that commitment to economic philosophy of freedom and opportunity to our also firm and diligent and robust commitment to capital markets, to the financial markets that have undergirded much of our risk-taking and opportunity and success.

And it's something I study a lot, think about a lot, and frankly maybe obsessed with. But I believe the 9-11 attackers understood this, too. And I don't think that that's talked about a lot. I think their bloodthirstiness, their hatred for America, obviously the political or religious fanaticism that undergirds it, the lack of regard for human life, all of those things are there. And yes, there's a foreign policy story there. and there's a geopolitical story there, and it's major.

But I also believe that understanding the reason the World Trade Center here in Manhattan was particularly targeted is very important. What the 9-11 jihadists saw as symbolic significance matters to us for reasons I want to get to today in the Dividing Cafe. I recently watched an 18-hour documentary series that I had actually not seen before, even though I've been a bit of a New York history buff for a long time. But Rick Burns and PBS had done a pretty authoritative, like I said, 18-hour documentary series that ended up being seven episodes on the history of New York City,

going back to the 16th century. and then they added an eighth episode all about the Trade Center. The documentary series initially aired on PBS in 1999, but they ended up adding an eighth episode in the aftermath of the 9-11 attack on the Trade Center. And I learned a bit more on the history of it than I knew before. But I think a lot of people know that it was officially dedicated and opened in 1973, but it began construction.

in 66. But there was a kind of vision for a sort of Renaissance downtown in the heart of our financial district, a kind of urban renewal objective involved an awful lot of moving parts. And there's a really vast story in the architecture, construction, the politics of it, whatever. I won't get into all that now. But the aftermath of the Trade Center's construction, It did result in a real significant home for many of our great financial companies and not just in the two Twin Towers, North and South, but in some of the adjacent buildings that were part of the World Trade Center ecosystem. And from Canter Fitzgerald to Morgan Stanley, I did not do my training into wealth management at Morgan Stanley. I was recruited to Morgan Stanley away from another company at UBS. And so I'm going to talk in a moment about me doing this program at UBS and Wehawk in New Jersey across the Hudson River.

But Morgan Stanley did their training program for new advisors in the trade center. And so over the years, I've known a lot of people that had actually entered the business, literally from Morgan Stanley's former spot in the trade center, but they had a lot of other functions that were done out of their lower Manhattan location. Solomon Smith Barney was down in the trade center ecosystem, AonCorp, major U.S. insurer, American Express, fiduciary trust, Credit Suisseurs, Boston, Deutsche Bank. I'm doing this from memory, but there's who's who of a lot of American financial giants that had been down in the trade center, literally, whether the Twin Towers or the buildings that were part of the center that were lower in elevation.

But it doesn't end there because Wall Street, in the literal sense of the word, which nobody ever talks about it, literally, sits right beneath where the trade center was. And in the shadows of this, this sort of financial district of lower Manhattan. You had Goldman Sachs, you had Merrill Lynch, you had so many different names, but also you had the actual New York Stock Exchange that is still there now. Back then, it was still a very functional building. It's really a museum and TV studio now because of the electronification of trading. But the New York Fed is across the street from there.

If I listed every law firm, small investment bank, what have you, that's down. there, it would take all day. This was a capital of American financial markets and this was all very much by design. There's a visualization, if you close your eyes, of American financial markets that brings one to some form of the Trade Center or the Twin Towers of Lower Manhattan, of Wall Street. These images are powerful. What we will see from the actual words of the jihadist who perpetrated the 9-11 attack is that they were for that reason. Their symbolic and literal role in American financial markets for those reasons they were targeted in these terror attacks. I go through quote by quote by quote in the dividend cafe.com

today and I'll do a sort of summary of some of these things here on the video and podcast. But Assam bin Laden said himself in 1996 that they wanted to kill the Americans and plunder their money. We wanted to make them taste the bitter consequences to drain them of their money as we had drained Russians before them. He went on to talk about the collapse of the Soviet Union happening because of the enormous sums they spent in their war that we had to drain their wealth and resources.

And that was used as a parallel multiple times in 1990. in 1998, Fatwas from Assam bin Laden, where he was calling on jihad against America. But it was always a jihad based on calling for murder and death, but also a war of economic attrition. The jihad positioned as an economic affair. We aim to make them pay a heavy price to bleed them to a point of bankruptcy. Just as they plunder our wealth, we shall drain theirs. And again, I'm just giving a couple highlights or low lights, as the case is, but there is literal quotation from these 1996 and 1998 documents. But Bin Laden was off the radar after the 9-11 attack as he was, of course, evading capture himself throughout the caves of Torabora. But we ended up hearing from him for the first time post-9-11 as he released a video through Al-Jazeera in October of 20.

2004, largely in an attempt, apparently, to sway the elections, the presidential election that would be taking place the next week. He basically sent a video for the first time since 9-11 as a campaign commercial against George W. Bush. But in the course of it, he reiterated the economic nature of these attacks. We continue this policy in bleeding America to appoint a bankruptcy. This is in addition to having experience in using guerrilla warfare and a war of economic attrition to fight tyrannical superpowers as we, alongside the Mahjadine, led Russia for 10 years until it wouldn't bankrupt and was forced to withdraw and defeat. He taunted the United States and basically referred to their attempt to bait us into wasting

money. All that we have to do is send to Mahajadine to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaeda to make their generals race to cause America to suffer human economic and political losses without achieving anything of note for it other than benefits to their private companies, had a real disdain for America's private enterprise system. The underlying aim was connected to a desire to make America squander economic resources. This had been foreshadowed by Assambriland before the attack and it was reiterated after the attack time and time again. It was bloodthirsty and it was murderous, as I have seen.

said. But it was not only that. It was connected to a specifically economic context of agenda of warfare. Now, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was the actual operational mastermind in 9-11, and for reasons I am unable to personally fathom is still alive, he is imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. And there's a number of things that he has said in the aftermath of 9-11 in the 9-11 commission report. KSM, I'll say KSM, so I don't have to keep repeating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. KS.M had told interrogators, I quote, they had long been interested in striking high-profile American targets, especially those with economic or symbolic significance. He and bin Laden had identified the World Trade Center as the symbol of U.S. economic power.

It was KSM's nephew, Ramsey Yusef, who my dear friend, Andy McCarthy successfully prosecuted, who had bombed the Trade Center in 1993. KSM claimed to be motivated by Yusef's conviction that these spectacular attacks would strike at the economic and symbolic heart of the United States. The rhetoric of the 9-11 perpetrators left no ambiguity around their attacks as both violent and economic. They wanted to do economic violence to America, and they wanted to undermine symbols of American prosperity, American economic strength that the Twin Towers represented. My question is, in the course of the loss of human life we suffered on 9-11, the economic

destruction that was done, the loss of property, and the incalculable tragedy that took place for families, friends, loved ones, fallen heroes. There was significant economic loss formmented by the attacks. But did they destroy American financial markets? Did they succeed in striking at the heart of our economic system? Did the symbolic value that was embedded in these lower Manhattan buildings undermined, did the loss of those buildings, undermined capital markets in America? The answer, of course, is no.

I recall, I mentioned that I did my time at Wealk in New Jersey, which is just a very, very short ferry ride across the Hudson River from Manhattan, and it happened to be the location of Payne Weber, which UBS had bought, where they had a kind of whole operational ecosystem. And I was there for the whole month of January 2002, just a few months after 9-11. And me and colleagues would spend many evenings, of course, at the bar at the hotel after a day of meetings and sessions, whatnot. And just talking shop and all that kind of stuff. Financial guys love getting together and talking finance.

And I remember meeting someone at the hotel bar. that was not with our group, was not part of UBS, but was a real senior IT executive at a very large financial institution. And one night, he spent a couple hours. I didn't talk much at all because I was so absorbed into listening. I remember this like it was yesterday. I'm not kidding you. Him walking through what they had done exactly that literally had them on three days later, ability to trade, ability to transact, ability to function, the sophistication of preparation that took place before the attack without any knowledge of an actual attack, but just the sort of contingency planning and how the mobility dynamism. That word sophistication is important

here. It's a technology sophistication in a way, but it's fascinating because while American investors and psyche was incredibly damaged by 9-11, the fact of the matter is that American financial firms and their function in capital markets was not. We kept our stock market closed for three or four, basically three and a half days. Well, you know, really four days because if you count the 9-11 day itself. But trading was up and running days later. The need for financial institutions to be a liquidity provider, and there was significant need for liquidity provision, I should add, the ability to make markets in financial instruments, the capacity for advice and giving around capital allocation to governments, to corporations, to institutions,

to investors, to businesses, absolutely uninterrupted. Asset prices were down, of course. the loss of life, property, tragedy, and every sense of the word. But their attempt to undermine American economic power symbolically fail. And you can call it resilience, but it was not surrender. We did not surrender in this key component. And I think that this is where it's important for me to get to an incredibly important part of American exceptionalism. I'm all for people having different points of passion and priority when they think about what they love most about America. When we look at what is the uniquely American ideal, I do believe there is a philosophical exceptionalism in our understanding of natural rights, the source of those rights, and the relationship of the state to the citizen in how those rights are secured.

I do not believe that we are the only free country on earth, but we have been the most prosperous or successful country over the last 250 years as our execution of, our application of some of those key founding principles has been so phenomenally wondrous in the lives of communities, families, states across our great country. You cannot understand the history of post-industrial revolution life and 20th century life without seeing the way that America's financial markets, superior to other global financial markets helped and coupled to our free enterprise system drove such a remarkable result in prosperity, in value creation, in productivity, in economic growth.

Our robust capital markets are the envy of the world. It is absolutely unquestionably important that we protect our capital markets, no matter what the temptation is to demonize Wall Street, which largely comes. from the ancient sin and still modern sin of covetousness. There are bad financial actors that give a bad name, but the wholesale demonization of private equity, of investment banks, of Wall Street, of market making, of the various elements that help bring capital to ideation,

that help bring investment to risk-taking. our financial markets, sophisticated as they may be, embedded in commercial banking, investment banking, private markets, venture capital. This is a sort of financial habitat that the terrorists were after on 9-11. And I believe that our need to defend our financial markets against internal forces, ideological, enemies of capital markets is important, just as I believe that our need to continue defending ourselves against external enemies who wish to harm us in our way of life is important. There are people who believe you can have capitalism without capital markets, and you

cannot. The 9-11 terrorists knew this, and I believe that they tried and failed, but those of us who create wealth, steward wealth, invest, act purposely for the purpose of producing goods and services, those who has to engage in the commercial society, involved in acts of investment, involves an acts of trade, partnering with others in these types of activities. We function day-to-day as economic actors, when we are investors, when we are entrepreneurs, when we are employees, and we are employers. And we do this because we are striving for a business. We are striving for better life for ourselves, for our loved ones, all of that. But we can't ever forget that our way of life involves markets. And those markets are worthy of being defended. Some people

knew this so well, they thought our markets were worthy of being attacked. Thank you for listening, watching, reading the Dividing Cafe. Thank you for bearing with me through a very difficult week in a lot of ways. And thank you for your ongoing, those of you clients, the Bonsa Group, your ongoing support, faith, confidence in the way we steward your affairs, utilizing America's robust financial markets as a tool in what we do. It's a great privilege to serve you. Have a wonderful weekend, and we'll be back with you. I'll be back to Monday for a dividend cafe. The Bonson Group is a group of investment professionals registered with Hightower Securities LLC member FINRA and SIPC with Hightower Advisors LLC, a registered investment advisor with the SEC.

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