Usa, September 11 ten years dopoCome has changed the economy

The terrorists of 11 September, the World Trade Center was the symbol of American capitalism. Destroy the two towers it meant destroying the economic system that had led the United States to be the first world power. Ten years later, the United States and the world are still paying the effects – economic, financial, social – of that event.

"It was not the 11 September changed the American economy," explains Anita Dancs, who teaches economics at Western New England University-. It's the way we respond to September 11 that changed the economy ". The idea that the most sensational terrorist act on American soil has been deep in the capitalist system seems in fact accepted by most scholars and who acts and works in the financial world, American or not. The one on which there is still no unanimity is what that Act has changed the capitalistic system.

There are those who, for example, counting the costs of 11 September, put everything, but really everything: human and material damage of the attacks, the stock market crash (the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell by 14 points in the hours immediately after the attack), increases in the price of petrol, the cost of renewed security systems at airports, government offices, roads, new shipping and insurance rates, and especially military expenditures in Iraq and Afghanistan.

For supporters of the "maximalist thesis", the 11 September has cost the United States over 4 thousand billion. A huge figure, which has further increased the already appalling debt and eroded, perhaps forever, the living standards of Americans. Above all, the 11 September would have introduced some policy "disastrous bad habits", which hardly you will return back. "For the first time since the American Revolution, the costs of the war were funded relying largely on debt," wrote Linda Bilmes and Nobel laureate Joseph Stiglitz, author of "The Three Trillion Dollar War". (For the two economists, only the costs of the wars in Afghanistan and in Iraq will cost the United States 4 trillion).

The "maximalist thesis" not like those who notice a too automatic mechanism of cause and effect. After 2002, in fact, many important things have happened, in no way connected – or hardly traceable to the terror and destruction that swept through the United States the 11 September. How to tie it to 11 September, the real estate bubble, followed by the mortgage crisis, followed by the financial crisis that has nurtured the most serious global economic downturn since the Wall Street crash of 1929? Better, much better, according to the proponents of a "minimum thesis", be limited to matters of actual damages, and in the short term, the attacks.

"September 11 was little more than a beep," explained to the Associated Press Adam Rose, terrorism expert and economics of the University of Southern California. Fixed costs Rose tragedy at around 130 billion dollars and CITES, as evidence of its argument, the fact that in early November 2001, the Dow Jones Industrial Average was quickly returned to pre-September 11 levels. Other factors also seem somehow devalue the centrality of terrorist acts. If today, motorists pay petrol double in 2001, not only from bloody feuds erupted in areas of oil production, but from the fact that the demand for energy is increased with the appearance on the stage of the world's other powers, and hundreds of millions of new consumers.

The one on which today appears to be a near total unanimity is the price paid for the increased security measures. "The true discriminant of September 11 is this – tells us David Cole, a lawyer from Georgetown University. The attacks did grow out of proportion the security industry ". A report of a Senate Committee has evaluated in about 400 billion expenditure incurred by the Federal Government to avoid the dreaded, and evoked, repetition of 11 September. 40 billion were paid only to increase security at airports.

Instead it is more difficult to calculate how much they spent companies to make their business more secure. Privacy issues are often kept well hidden numbers these outputs (often transferred to consumers). But "doing business in the United States has become increasingly expensive after September 2001," said Sung Won Sohn of the California State University at Channel Islands. New security staff, video surveillance, screening at the entrance of workplaces, secure computer systems (especially for banks and financial institutions) have multiplied the costs. The financial crisis and the assassination of Osama bin-Laden, should have decreased perception of the danger and possibility of support costs so high. "At this point, however, is difficult to go back, and dismantle the Pharaonic security system," explains Cole.

It is however difficult to stand from the head that the real economic legacy of September 11 have their own military expenditure, the river of money pumped by the Bush administration, and then from that Obama, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in any other part of the world in which the United States have perceived a (supposed) danger. The 4 trillion that Stiglitz and Bilmes have seen take the road of Afghanistan and Iraq were stolen at work, investment, health, education. "You can't spend billions in a failed war abroad, and not feel the pain at home," they wrote Stiglitz and Bilnes. Apart from the numbers and percentages, it is precisely that "pain" – in homes, on the boards, schools and hospitals – that Americans have more perceived after September 2001.