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New York Stock Exchange to Reopen
Representatives of New York's police and fire departments will ring the opening bell of the New York Stock Exchange on Monday, ending a four-day shutdown forced by devastating terror attacks that tore through the financial district.
In honor of the victims of the attack and their families, two minutes of silence will follow the traditional opening bell, an NYSE spokeswoman told Reuters on Sunday. The NYSE, the world's largest stock market, is located three blocks southeast to the mountain of rubble that used to be the World Trade Center, in lower Manhattan.
"All the testing is completed and everything is a go," a NYSE spokesperson said. "Everything was completed yesterday."
Investors are bracing for a rocky start. The outlook for stock prices, at least in the short term, is grim, analysts say. The attacks on New York's financial district and the Pentagon building outside Washington, D.C., have intensified fears that a sluggish U.S. economy will slip into a recession.
Despite the prospect of a sharp decline in share prices on Monday morning, officials have been determined to reopen the stock markets on Monday, in part because of the symbolism of a speedy return to normalcy.
The task has been formidable. U.S. financial markets have been paralyzed since Tuesday after two hijacked planes toppled the World Trade Center's twin 110-story towers, leaving an enormous pile of twisted steel and glass and some 5,000 people feared dead. It has been the longest shutdown since March 1933, when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered a special banking holiday to prevent bank runs in the Great Depression.
"We think we're ready for it," Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said Sunday. "Some of it obviously ... is trial and error."
The two other main U.S. exchanges, the American Stock Exchange and the Nasdaq, also will reopen after successful weekend tests. No. 2 U.S. exchange Nasdaq's systems are up and running, a spokesman told Reuters on Sunday. The most critical tests checked on the market's connectivity via telephone lines to Wall Street's scattered brokerage firms.
The Securities and Exchange Commission said on Sunday all the nation's securities markets would open on Monday.
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