WASHINGTON -- When two hijacked airliners brought down a gleaming symbol of global capitalism, they also struck a body-blow to the world's largest economy.

The horrifying day that claimed more than 3,000 lives sharply worsened an economic downturn and once and for all put an end to America's decade of unbridled prosperity.

Wall Street - where millions of new traders had been building retirement nest eggs during the high-tech boom - saw its longest shutdown since the great depression.

On the day of the attacks, London's FTSE-100 plunged to 4,746, its biggest percentage fall since October 1987. The next day, Tokyo's Nikkei fell below 10,000 for the first time in 17 years.

When the bourse in New York reopened on September 17, panicked investors drove the Dow Jones index down 684 points, or 7.1 percent, to 8,920, its biggest-ever one-day point loss.

The good times were over. The days when middle-class Americans democratized the fruits of capitalism by riding the dot-com wave gave way to a new, darker reality - the new century's first war.

The rest of the world was caught head-on in the shock waves of the September 11 terrorist attacks. With growth already sluggish in Europe and stagnant in Japan, the attacks threatened to bring on a global recession.

In a world ever-more connected through capital and trade flows, the attacks would condemn 10 million more people in the Third World to abject poverty, World Bank President James Wolfensohn warned.

American consumers - reeling under the attacks and scared by a series of anthrax mail attacks - temporarily lost their taste for spending money.

Despite Congress passing a $6-billion bailout for the airline industry, U.S. Airways filed for bankruptcy protection in August. Elsewhere, Belgium's Sabena went bankrupt, and Swissair, Ireland's Air Lingus and Poland's Lot had to be rescued by their governments.

The U.S. tourism sector, which employs 17 million people, suffered a severe setback, and leisure travel everywhere slowed dramatically, especially to the Caribbean and the Middle East.

The global insurance sector was hit hard, and commercial property and liability insurance rates have since gone up an average of 30 percent, The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development estimated.

But amid all the gloom, the resilience of the U.S. economy surprised most observers.

The Central Bank's aggressive interest-rate reductions to a 41- year low, higher defense and security spending, and a 10-year, 1.35- trillion-dollar income tax cut all helped nurse the economy back to relative health, albeit at the cost of ballooning budget deficits for years to come.

Worldwide, central banks kicked off a huge round of monetary loosening to keep consumers spending, and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) said the world economy narrowly scraped past a recession.