Scott Burns from MSN Money thinks there is a connection:

“We were in the second year of a brutal three-year stock market decline when radical Islamic terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center. Even so, borrowed money wasn’t dirt cheap. The federal funds rate, down from nearly 6% during the Internet boom years, was 3.65% in August 2001. It fell to 1.75% within weeks of the terrorist attacks. Policymakers struggled to keep the economy from coming to a standstill. The federal funds rate continued to drop, hitting a low of 0.98% in December 2003. That was more than two years after the attacks. We were well into a powerful stock market recovery. The federal funds rate stayed around 1% long enough to set off a boom in low-cost mortgages and in home prices. Home buyers discovered that very ordinary paychecks could now buy extraordinary homes. People with cash to deposit learned their money earned virtually nothing. Interest rates on home mortgages dropped fast enough that the National Association of Realtors’ housing affordability index showed that almost anyone could buy a house somewhere in America…. During the same period, the Consumer Price Index rose only 2.9% annualized.”

He might be onto something … or he might not.