In the immediate aftermath of September 11, 2001, Alan Greenspan led a very quiet effort to ensure that America didn't plunge into an economic meltdown, taking the rest of the world with it. There was good reason to fear the worst: the stock market crash of October 1987, Greenspan's first major crisis, coming just weeks after he took the reins of the Federal Reserve Board, had come much closer than the general public still knows to freezing the financial system and triggering a genuine old-fashioned financial panic; disaster was only averted through the exhaustive personal intervention of Greenspan and his top lieutenants. And October 1987 was a pin-prick next to September 2001. But the most remarkable thing that happened after 9/11 from an economic point of view was...that nothing happened. A shock to the system that would have surely crippled the American economy in an earlier day was absorbed astonishingly quickly. And this just a year after what was called the Great Crash of 2000, on paper the biggest destruction of equity value in American history, which coincided with the related wipeout of the American telecom industry that saw hundreds of billions of dollars in investments come to a bad end. And yet, if you look at a chart of America's GDP for the past 15 years, you literally can't find that "great crash," or 9/11 - there's not even a dip, not even a tremor....