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.

Syntagma Media is pleased to relaunch Moneyizor.com as a tracker of the hot topic of the moment : macroeconomics.

If that doesn’t sound terribly exciting, think “credit crunch”, “global financial meltdown”, “economy falling off a cliff”, “new Great Depression”, and your adrenalin may just kick in.

The news has been so alarming since last summer, I’ve been writing a lot about this developing crisis here in Syntagma. It’s not really the right place for it, though, so Moneyizor has been galvanized as a vehicle for this crucial topic.

“On the day when the UK’s biggest mortgage lender, the Halifax, reported a staggering 2.5pc drop in house prices in March alone, the IMF warns governments, central banks and regulators that they now face a test of their mettle unique in modern times.” An extract from today’s article.

Make sure you keep up to date on Crunch matters with Moneyizor.

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.

How is your knowledge of the 1929 Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression that followed it in the 1930s?

Not so good? Don’t worry, you’re not alone. But this is likely to be one of the world’s biggest talking points in coming months and years.

I was reminded of the Depression yesterday by the appearance of one of the legendary names from that distant era in the rescue of U.S. bank Bear Stearns.

J.P. Morgan was the renowned banker called on by the President to sort out the financial mess during one of the slumps of the period. Morgan set about systematically weeding out the companies that should be allowed to go to the wall, and those that were too important to allow to fail.

Yesterday the old feller’s bank, JP Morgan Chase and the New York Federal Reserve combined to stuff funds back into failing giant Bear Stearns, brought low by the gathering credit crunch.

The problem this time around is one of leverage and its effects on banks’ lending ratios — the multiple of lending to capital reserves a financial institution is allowed to build up by the authorities. The Geneva standard is that a bank’s capital must not fall below 8 percent of its lending. That number has been around a long time — I remember it from Alfred Marshall’s ancient classic textbook on economics during my university days.

Eight percent represents a ratio of 12.5 of lending to capital. These days it’s the norm for private equity companies to leverage many times more than that — supported by banks, of course, which then calculate their capital on a hugely inflated valuation for partly subprime debt. When the bubble bursts — as is now happening — both sides of the deal collapse.

Recently-bust Carlyle Capital Corporation (CCC) leveraged its equity 32 times to finance a $21.7bn portfolio of residential mortgage-backed securities issued by Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. These instruments were financed by some of the biggest names in world banking.

With the housing market going south with a vengeance, it’s said that many banks’ capital reserves to lending ratios have slipped close to zero. The global financial system is floating on a cushion of fresh air.

There are always the consolations of philosophy for us to fall back on. Not the nitpicking academic variety which parses the meaning of words to death, but the active philosophy of Socrates whose adage, “The unexamined life is not worth living” should be a talisman of the financial sector.

In Britain, Gordon Brown’s Financial Services Authority (FSA), set up by him ten years ago to police the financial markets and the banks, completely missed the Northern Rock collapse, which was due to the bank raising money solely on the money markets and bundling the debts — many subprime — into packages and selling the risk on. When the money markets dried up, the bank had nowhere to go but to the Government to bail it out and eventually to nationalize it.

“The unexamined life is not worth living”. It seems the FSA did not examine the fifth largest bank in the UK, or spot the snake oil splashing around its floors.

Now consider what happened next as an example of both hubris and the reverse of Socrates’s dictum. Brown is calling for a “global financial watchdog” to perform for the entire planet what his FSA did for Britain.

Self-knowledge where art thou? The man has the richest fantasy life since Walt Disney.

Since we can’t have financial stability, or even politicians who examine their actions carefully, we must fall back on the real consolations of philosophy — everything changes and nothing remains the same.

Except death and taxes, of course.