Today is the 20th anniversary of that tragic event. It resulted in more social, political, and economic change than anything in most of our lifetimes until the pandemic.
Including payments, as I wrote about in Is Covid-19 Payments’ 9/11 Moment? The article links to one of the lesser-known changes wrought by the attack. It took the 9/11 crisis to get U.S. federal legislation moving to put scanned check images on the same legal footing as the paper originals.
After the attacks, all air travel in the country was shut down for a week, which caused a severe backup in the clearing process that required emergency intervention from the Fed to keep payments flowing. I have linked to this many times because the story is beautifully written in the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s 2001 annual report.
