Twenty-Five Years On: Blue Skies, Bird Song, and the American Comeback

Twenty-Five Years On: Blue Skies, Bird Song, and the American Comeback

By Joe Tigay, Portfolio Manager, Rational Equity Armor Fund

Twenty-five years ago, I was a junior at Michigan State University, working an early shift at the business library in the Broad building. I remember that morning vividly, in the way you only remember the mornings that split time into before and after.

As I left my house, my neighbor — a woman well into her nineties who was almost never up that early — stopped me on the sidewalk. She told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. It was so out of character for her to be outside at that hour that it stopped me cold. I knew, somehow, that this mattered.

The library was empty when I got there, so I asked if it would be alright to turn on a radio, just quietly, at the front desk. That’s how I heard that a second plane had hit. Not long after, campus locked down. Classes were cancelled. Rumors moved faster than facts — someone said MSU’s nuclear reactor put us on a target list. Nobody really knew anything, and that not-knowing was its own kind of fear.

With the campus locked down, I walked home. It was scary. It was uncertain. And it was, strangely, one of the most beautiful walks I’ve ever taken. The sky that day was a blue I had never seen over Michigan — the kind of blue you only get when every plane in American airspace has been grounded and there isn’t a single contrail cutting across it. I could hear birds. Actual birdsong, clear and close, in a way city noise usually swallows up.

I felt afraid. I felt angry. I felt confused. And underneath all of it, walking home under that impossible sky, I felt something else too: I was glad, plainly and simply, to be American.

That feeling has never left me, and twenty-five years later, I think it’s worth saying out loud again — especially for the people who made the ultimate sacrifice, and for the helpers who ran toward the danger while the rest of us were still trying to understand what was happening.

The people who attacked us that day didn’t just hate America. They hated that we stand for justice, and that we stand beside other nations who share that same commitment. That’s part of why I love this country — not just for what it has built, but for what it’s willing to defend. America stands for justice, and it stands with the allies who stand for justice alongside us. That is worth remembering too.

Here’s what I’ve come to believe, both as someone who lived that day and as someone who now spends his career thinking about markets:

Twenty-five years ago, the terrorists attacked the World Trade Center because it was a symbol of American capitalism and economic freedom. They attacked our buildings, our financial system and, most painfully, the people who made that system work. More than 1,400 members of the financial and insurance community were lost at just a handful of firms, including 658 people at Cantor Fitzgerald alone.

The market stayed closed for four trading days, and when it reopened, the Dow dropped more than 14% that week. But the market opened. The trades cleared. Companies rebuilt. People went back to work. That was the first answer America gave.

The answer over the next 25 years has been even more powerful. Since the last close before the attacks, the S&P 500 has increased nearly sevenfold before even counting dividends. The Nasdaq has risen more than fifteenfold. Along the way, American capitalism absorbed wars, a financial crisis, a pandemic, inflation and countless predictions of its decline.

Capitalism is not resilient because markets never fall. It is resilient because free people keep rebuilding, investing, innovating and moving forward. We should never forget those we lost — and we should never take for granted the freedom and opportunity they represented.

Twenty-five years later, I still think about that walk home: the fear, the uncertainty, and that impossibly blue, quiet sky. It’s a reminder that even on our darkest days, there is still something worth protecting, worth rebuilding, and worth being grateful for. God bless the helpers, God bless the lives we lost, and God bless America.