At a time in my life which now seems centuries ago, I was once a young lieutenant, barely a year out of West Point, and I had recently been assigned to lead an electronic warfare platoon.
Whenever my unit wasn’t deployed or in the field, most of my duty days were spent in a top-secret facility called a SCIF— the kind of place that was guarded by military police and didn’t have any windows.
But every Tuesday morning at 9 a.m. sharp, my unit would formally assemble at the Brigade motor pool to conduct routine PMCS checks— Army-speak for vehicle maintenance.
September 11, 2001, started like any other Tuesday morning.
Being on time in the Army is considered late, so naturally we all showed up to the motor pool around 10 minutes early. And the regular business after the formation only lasted about 5 minutes.
But in that brief 15-minute window, from the time we were milling around the motor pool to the time I was going back to the SCIF, the entire world changed.
I was about to walk into the building when one of my sergeants approached me and said, “Sir, I don’t know if you heard, but terrorists just flew planes into the World Trade Center.”
My reaction was disbelief. This dude is crazy. But the look on his face suggested he was serious.
I mumbled some meekish “whaaaaat” sort of reaction and exhaled a pfff of confusion, but then walked inside where the military police at the desk were refreshing CNN.com. I saw the screen. Images of carnage in New York. It was real.
After handing over my little Nokia bar phone, I was buzzed in and walked down one of the halls where someone had set up a TV— an old-school cathode ray tube mounted on a big rolling cart, just like the ones my teachers used back in middle school.
NBC was on. The chipper, perma-smile morning crew was still trying to anchor the horrific news coverage and doing their best to make sense of what was happening. Then legendary news veteran Tom Brokaw took over and brought those of us in the room— and the rest of America— up to speed.
Everyone over the age of 35 or so has their own version of this ‘where was I’ story about 9/11.
They’re called ‘flashbulb memories,’ and they’re forever emblazoned in our brains. It made me realize that my dad wasn’t kidding around when he once went into vivid detail about the moment he heard that JFK had been shot.
We’ve experienced a few others over the past 25 years.
Many of us remember where we were when we heard about the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I certainly do— my best friend called me and told me to turn on CNBC. It was Sunday September 14, 2008… and they were broadcasting live footage of Lehman Brothers employees filing into their office with cardboard boxes to clean out their desks.
The global financial system nearly collapsed the following day.
Similarly, many of us remember where we were when we first realized that COVID was real.
All of these flashbulb events over the past quarter century— with today being the 25th anniversary of 9/11— are reminders that the world can change in an instant.
Even if you’re too young to remember 9/11, you probably at least remember the pandemic. Everything changed, practically overnight.
To be frank, there will be others. We may see a day similar to the September 2008 financial crisis, when Americans tune in to see the bond market collapsing and Treasury yields surging… because foreigners are dumping their US government bonds all at once.
The irony is that a large part of America’s $40 trillion national debt… and hence the challenges with deficits, inflation, etc… are in large part due to the seismic shift after 9/11.
Before 9/11, America was in solid shape. The federal government was running a small budget surplus. And while the economy was slowing a bit and working off its hangover from the excesses of the tech boom in the 1990s, life was good.
But America went to war less than four weeks later on October 7, 2001. It lasted for twenty years and cost trillions upon trillions of dollars. Spending surged. The bureaucracy expanded. The surveillance state exploded.
And it all kicked off a borrowing spree that continues to this day. With the national debt now in excess of $40 trillion, more than 125% of GDP, America’s standing is waning rapidly.
Yes, there’s plenty of good news today and cause for optimism.
But the reality is that foreign ownership of US government bonds is falling. Even allies are starting to diversify. And it’s not hard to understand why: the US debt situation is a complete disaster.
So if this trend continues, we could absolutely experience another flashbulb-type event, where the whole world witnesses, in real time, the loss of America’s primacy.
The reaction will be similar to what most of us experienced on 9/11: total disbelief.
To be clear, nobody dies when yields spike, and a bond market crash is nothing like watching the towers fall. But the disbelief will be identical, because almost no one thinks it can happen here. It’s not supposed to happen here.
But it can. It just might. And if it does, just like the other flashbulb events— 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and the pandemic— the world could change dramatically in just 15 minutes.
