By Ariana Cha
The Washington Post
NEW YORK — With stock markets scheduled to open here Monday for the first time since Tuesday’s terrorist attacks, major financial firms and other organizations are calling on Americans to demonstrate their patriotism by buying stocks or at least by holding on to their investments.
"If we are going to rebuild, provide for the families of the victims and fund the effort, we have to keep a strong economy to do it," Dave Sackett of the polling firm Tarrance Group wrote in a note to business associates and friends.
Mike Morgan lives about 15 miles from the Pentagon, where cleanup crews are still sorting through the rubble. His message to associates was similar: "Could we please appeal to the investment houses and the American public investors to … hold their ground?" he wrote in an e-mail. "This need not be the spark that throws the economy into a downward spiral due to fear and emotion and selfish greed."
The reopening of the New York Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq stock market will end a four-day halt in trading, the longest pause since the Great Depression, and many fear that panicked selling could send the country into economic turmoil.
But if 33-year-old Becca Romish is any indication, the impassioned pleas of Sackett, Morgan and others are working.
Walking around Sunday morning in midtown Manhattan, which temporarily has become the city’s financial nexus, she said she had been planning to liquidate many of her mutual-fund investments soon but had changed her mind in the wake of the catastrophe.
"The big institutional investors have said they will hold so, so will I," said Romish, a director of technology for a private school.
Wall Street sources have said that securities firms and corporations have a "gentleman’s agreement" to buy shares if a flood of sell orders threatens to crash the market. And high-tech bellwether Cisco Systems Inc. and several other major companies announced they would buy back billions of dollars of their own shares to show their confidence in the economy.
Romish said she needed cash from her mutual-fund investments to pay off credit card debt and business school loans. But, she said, she was more than willing to take a financial hit to do her part for her country.
Stock exchange officials have said they will provide surgical masks to employees to protect them from the acrid smell in the area. The stock exchange building, while not damaged, is only a few blocks from what used to be the World Trade Center, now a mangled jumble of metal and concrete into which thousands of people disappeared.
"We think we’re ready for it," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Sunday of Monday’s opening. "Some of it obviously … is trial and error." Investors anxiously awaited the markets’ reopening.
The Wall Street subway station is closed, and only subways on the east side of downtown Manhattan will run at all. A new ferry service will carry passengers across the East River from Brooklyn. Streets are closed to vehicles and some thoroughfares are blocked altogether.
Even so, Giuliani has made reopening the area — home to the city’s financial and government sectors — a priority. The New York Stock Exchange had a successful test Saturday of its computer and communications systems.
"The life of the city goes on, and I encourage people to go about they’re lives," said Giuliani. "One of the best things they can do to show how strong they are, and to show how terrorists can’t cower us, is to not be cowered."
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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