It was a beautiful Tuesday morning. I was on a corporate retreat at a ruggedly handsome resort in the Missouri Ozarks. A cholesterol-laden breakfast was slowly percolating down my GI tract. It was a good day. After opening remarks teasing everyone about the night before, we dutifully set off on to our breakout sessions. My first breakout was situated in the resort's board room - adjacent to the business offices... offices abuzz with a frenzy unexpected in this bucolic setting.Time and date stamp on this reality check: 8:30am, Tuesday, September 11, 2001.
OMG!! WTF!! Fill in your response. How does one behave, what does one say in the light of such horror? I sat and cried for two hours as the second plane hit and then the both towers came down. Why this jacked me up personally is another story.
But while I was sobbing in my sadness, the rest of the world was responding quite differently. Gas spiked from to $1 to $4 a gallon. (I had driven down to the resort on a full tank, now less than a quarter tank left. I'm not sure how much cash I had available to me, but I remember having to borrow $20 from a friend for in case I couldn't access cash on the drive home.) Bags of ice bags doubled in price. In the midst of panic, those with commodities and resources rule. If I had been on my own, with neither money in my pocket nor in the bank (as is often the case!), what in God's precious name would I have done? It is a lesson well learned and not soon forgotten.
Is this going to happen again? Who thought it was going to happen in the first place? In The Black Swan, Nassim Taleb makes a compelling case not just for the unexpected happening, but that the unexpected happens because we don't think it could. That was the case of 9/11... and it will likely be the case next time around - we won't see it coming.
That was reality check #1.
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