The answer, of course, is yes.
When OBL took down the twin towers (and yes, truthers, his cult members did), Greenspan panicked and took rates down and kept them down. And then we all know what happened next.
Here's HP's post from 2007, and the recent column on the MSN homepage (thanks Ray)
Did terrorists cause the housing mess?
The link may not seem obvious at first. But if you look at the Sept. 11 plotters' goals -- and at what has happened in the US since the attacks -- it's hardly far-fetched.
The federal funds rate continued to drop, hitting a low of 0.98% in December 2003. That was more than two years after the attacks. We were well into a powerful stock market recovery. The federal funds rate stayed around 1% long enough to set off a boom in low-cost mortgages and in home prices.
Home buyers discovered that very ordinary paychecks could now buy extraordinary homes. People with cash to deposit learned their money earned virtually nothing.
We could, of course, blame the Federal Reserve for keeping interest rates too low for too long. We could also blame Wall Street. Or mortgage lenders and their brokers. And we could blame the borrowers for being foolish. We certainly can't take any pride in the greed-driven decisions that fueled the problem.
But one big fact remains: None of this misery would have happened if Sept. 11 hadn't happened first.
