If you add up the major crises now facing the world — rocketing food prices, chronic wars in the Middle East, the credit crunch, high oil and commodity prices, and the slow motion global recession — they can all be traced directly back to September 11, 2001, when a few passenger jets were flown into three strategic American buildings.

That day has taken on an eerie similarity with the murder of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajavo in 1914, which triggered the conflagration of the First World War. Like the aftermath of that assassination, the reactions to 9/11 were, in retrospect, out of all proportion to the actual historical significance, despite the deep emotional shock it caused. Human reactions are driven by dark psychological currents, not cost-benefit analyses.

Consider the credit crunch. Joseph Stiglitz’s book The Three Trillion Dollar War (reviewed here) argues persuasively that Alan Greenspan’s policy of holding interest rates below optimal levels, for longer than anyone deemed necessary, was aimed at masking the enormous cost of the Iraq war on the American economy. The war was a result of 9/11.

Combined with rising house prices, the loose policy opened the way to a splurge of mortgage lending to the U.S. trailer-park poor, the sub-prime end of the market, and the rather guilty repackaging of it into faux Triple-A assets, which were sold on around the world. From those actions, we now have global economic turmoil hanging over us again.

The wars themselves are widely seen as a catastrophe for America’s reputation around the world, despite the late surge and the silent successes of the British SAS in taking out Al Quaeda leaders in the north. Whether they will inflict the psychological damage of Vietnam is not yet known, but it’s a distinct possibility.

As for commodity and food prices, the fighting in the Middle East drove up the price of oil, now heading to $120 a barrel, which has had a knock-on effect in all other markets, especially food.

In an inflationary environment, merchants tend to hoard their stocks in warehouses, betting on higher prices down the line. It’s a one-way bet right now, so a lot of the world’s grain output is locked away, pushing up prices at an even greater rate and shoving millions into hunger. Those positions will unravel quickly though at the first sign of a price peak, when dealers will dump their stocks on the world food markets. Prices will then drop sharply, revealing the real danger to the world — deflation and slump.

History comes down to us in a highly condensed form in which major events seem to follow each other in rapid succession. In reality they are interspersed by long periods of calm, even small recoveries and bursts of optimism. The underlying trend is still downward though, with much poison yet to unwind in a collapsing spiral of self-reinforcing declines.

The attack on 9/11 will almost certainly become the defining event of the 21st century, setting the tone for the rest, just as Franz Ferdinand’s death led to two world wars, a Great Depression and a cold war, plus the rise of some of the most evil figures in human history.

That’s why I say, 9/11 is still with us. It’s not going away anytime soon.