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.

It’s happening now in America and is due here in the UK and Europe by summer, if the usual time lags apply.

The recession / depression / crash is on its way like an unstoppable tsunami.

A tsunami is not a “tidal wave”. Waves break and retreat when they hit shallow waters or the shore. A tsunami trundles on for miles inshore powered by tremendous forces out in the deep ocean. No power on earth can stop it until its energy is spent.

Those who think we can stop a deep recession from happening by fiddling with interest rates or printing liquidity are looking at wave science not tsunamis. Now we can only watch and hope.

The signs of families cutting back their spending are everywhere here in Britain. Apart from the super-rich, ordinary folk are drawing in their horns as if they never existed. This mass retreat from the markets is beginning to have a cumulative effect which can only build to an inevitable crescendo.

The banks are barely functioning, except as deposit-takers. When they get our money they hoard it like the early Ebenezer Scrooge — the kind of man who creates depressions or shows us how to avoid them, depending on your point of view.

America is in deep trouble now, deserted even by the Sovereign Wealth Funds of the Orient, who just a few weeks ago seemed like saviours. Now they are pulling their cash out and retreating to the new economies of the East.

The “carry trade” to smaller Western economies, like Turkey, Iceland, Latvia, Estonia and others is falling apart, as will these countries in the coming months. Iceland may well be the first to crack, like some monstrous symptom of global warming tearing apart the ice sheets.

Those that are in the eurozone are being held together only by the common currency, the euro. But the fault-lines are beginning to show and it seems only a matter of time before the whole system snaps in a great twanging of over-stretched elastic. Beethoven would not recognize the new European Symphony about to be played. An Ode to Joy it isn’t.

If we look at all this from a Scroogian perspective though, it’s a kind of deep-cleanse that the world’s febrile financial sectors need — and this is certainly a problem of their making. This tsunami began in the boardrooms of banks and retail lenders, not in the real economy where most of us work — although our greed doubtless helped.

As America contracts, like a crab sensing danger, we can only await the storms to come. And they are the least of it. The unstoppable tsunami is the real enemy.

Syntagma never says “I told you so”. It’s an irritating phrase that adds nothing to a debate. It’s also a pyrrhic victory when the bad times roll.

We’re talking about the American economy, of course — now in recession, as we’ve been predicting for months — and the British and European financial positions, which are trailing some way behind the U.S., but about to implode too.

We’ve been on the case since last June when the ominous tag “credit crunch” started to be bandied about in response to falling American house prices.

As online publishers we are partially protected from the ravages faced by bricks and mortar operations. Even so, Google responded to the same data last year by dumping lots of small publishers using its AdWords/AdSense programs and its range of offshoot partnerships.

ZDNet Editor in Chief Larry Dignan believes that “the dip in Google’s paid clicks was intentional, part of a strategic plan designed to deliver better, more-precisely targeted ads” and tends “to reflect macroeconomic conditions” — an acknowledgment that suggests Google isn’t recession-proof.

The knock-on effects lowered the earning power of a whole raft of mid-sized publishers who operate below the glass ceiling of scalability needed to challenge the giant press barons of the print media.

Given the power of this pincer movement, how should internet marketers and publishers ride out the troubles ahead, which may even include another dotcom crash?

Here at Syntagma we are developing two new business models which don’t depend exclusively on Google rankings and big investment in assets. We have also moved to conserve cash, now the most sought after commodity in global financial markets. Forget equities, bonds and angel lending. Asset-backing is truly out of fashion. Only cash and gold will do during the next two to five years, or maybe even longer than that. Japan took more than a decade to haul itself out of its banking crisis and the profound deflation of the 1990s.

I really don’t see how mid-sized businesses, with heavy debt, and/or lots of equity in the hands of VCs, can get through this otherwise.

The Fed’s dramatic easing of monetary policy, which still has some way to go, is barely making an impact, although the usual lags apply. In the 1990s, Japan found that zero, even negative, interest rates could not persuade its reluctant public to splash out in the shops. Longer term rates in the U.S. are already close to zero.

Ben Bernanke is apparently studying the Japanese experience of zero rates right now. Surely a sign of what’s to come.

The game now appears to be out of the hands of the authorities whatever they decide to do. Bernanke deserves credit for at least trying. His next move will surely be to throw the kitchen sink at the problem and let the Devil take the hindmost. This is no time for musings on “moral hazard”, the hazard is not inflation but deflation and slump. Massive U.S. Government loans to individual defaulters can’t be ruled out and may be just around the corner.

Compare that to the lethargic approach of the Bank of England and the European Central Bank. Still holding rates at 5.25 percent and 4 percent respectively, although the BoE has little room to manoeuvre thanks to Gordon Brown’s obsession with public-sector spending.

The first casualties could be some major institutions in America and monetary union in Europe, where the euro currency is looking very vulnerable. At least Brown got that right.

Syntagma predicts we are going to be amazed by developments in the not too distant future. The world may look a very different place when we come out of this, and it won’t necessarily be all bad news. Bubbles have to burst. Nature demands it. And the end of the eurozone would be a big plus for European freedom.

Nearly a year ago I wrote a post called These are the good times. They were and still are, uncomfortable though the ride may be.

We’re here at last in our new offices in the West Country of England. Nearby is the Elizabethan Quay and the kind of architecture you only see in films.

We have lots of plans going forward including a new site, Sideways Health, which we hope to launch next week +. This could develop into a mega health site on the one domain, which will be a departure for us.

There’s also our private subscription retail information site to roll out next month, which will probably be the flagship of the business in coming months.

It’s been a tough grind over the past two and a half years, but we’re now beginning to mature as a business, partially breaking clear of the old SEO plus advertising model into a cluster-attack mode that makes us less dependent on one factor staying the same, while insulating us from the swings and roundabouts of internet business.

The year ahead is going to be a hard one for everybody, with the American economy having “fallen off a cliff” at the turn of the year, and Britain set for an even bigger fall.

To counteract this, we’ve switched to retrench mode, clearing away all debts, diversifying our interests and cutting costs sharply. We’re confident it will do the trick even if another dotcom crash is imminent.

How are you doing?