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Confidence on Wall Street is shaken

Daneil McFaddan of the US Park Police with his canine partner Durac at Federal Hall overlooking the New York Stock Exchange on Wall Street, Wednesday. PHOTO: NY TIMES

Wall Street was open for business Wednesday, but business was not the first order of business.

It has been a horrific 12 months for participants in the financial markets, a stretch that began with jets plowing into the World Trade Center, but has continued with the scandals at Enron and WorldCom and an assault on the integrity of the financial community.

Usually a place of swagger, Wall Street is now filled with self-doubt. Remembering what happened a year ago did little to assuage the sense of unease.

"I woke up this morning and said I need this day to put what happened a year ago behind me," said Jane I. Mehring, an analyst at Salomon Smith Barney. "That feeling lasted for about 10 seconds."

Mehring and her colleagues were in Salomon Smith Barney's headquarters on Greenwich Street, only blocks north of the World Trade Center, when the planes hit.

Banks, which provide liquidity to the financial system, were open as normal. So was the bond market, the vast and deep provider of credit. The stock market, the home of equities, delayed its opening by 90 minutes in observance of what happened a year ago on Sept. 11.

Despite everything that has happened since, Tuesday night the market sent a message that it knew what Sept. 11 was all about: when trading ended Tuesday, the Standard & Poor's 500 futures contract closed at 911.

"You can't tell me that was by sheer accident," said James W. Paulsen, chief investment officer of Wells Capital Management in Minneapolis. "Somebody on the floor was going to make a statement. And they did."

Paulsen was on his way to the West Coast on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.

His plane was ordered down in Denver. He didn't get home for four days, and had to drive across the Great Plains to get there.

Louis Crandall, chief economist at Wrightson & Associates, was at his desk on the 25th floor of the North Tower a year ago on Sept. 11. Wednesday morning he went to work in a warehouse on West Street, not all that far from ground zero. Going to work, he said, was the right thing to do.

"What is so unusual about these remembrances is that there is something tied very directly to your professional life," he said. "Being in your professional setting doesn't seem inappropriate."

Most firms were open for business, but staffing levels were below normal. The bond market was open, but, as Crandall said, "I haven't heard any phones ringing."

One firm that elected to keep its doors closed was Cantor Fitzgerald, the brokerage that lost 658 of its 970 employees who worked at the World Trade Center. Cantor's offices in the US were closed, and its eSpeed In., its electronic trading arm, shut at 2pm.

John Lonski, chief economist at Moody's Investors Service, was forced to evacuate his office at the lower end of Manhattan a year ago. He didn't return until November.

Wednesday morning, looking out the window of his office at the ceremonies commemorating the anniversary, Lonski said he was "struck by how many lives were affected by this tragedy. I saw an endless line of people marching down a platform toward where the North Tower stood."

Given the nature of the day, Lonski said "it's not necessarily a day where one is joyfully going about their task, that is for sure. Yet amid the sadness you can pick up some sense of hope."

In midtown Manhattan, Dave Memmott, head of block trading at Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, was on the job. But he, too, said he was in the right place on this first anniversary.

"It's very sad and it is right back in your face," he said. But "I knew a lot of guys who worked downtown. And knowing them I think they would want us to carry on. So we are carrying on."
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