And the third is the longer run, beyond 2003. The near-term effects. The near-term effects are dominated by the disruption to certain industries – airlines, in particular, but also other travel-related industries such as hotels, entertainment, and tourism – and the psychological effects on households and businesses.
Policymakers can do very little over this timeframe to affect the outcome, other than to bolster consumer and business confidence by what they do and say. We have a variety of measures of consumer sentiment. In normal times, these measures, in my view, offer relatively little predictive power for household spending.