Some people respond to the attacks in Paris, and others like them, by saying it's the end of the world. Sell everything, buy gold, go to your bunker, eat canned food and hunker down.

I don't think any of that is true.

I agree terrorism is a challenge the West faces. It can be existential. And that can summon an existential response.

One of the things I like to do in analyzing the true impact of the attack is to compare it to the attacks on 9/11. I don't think body counts are the way to think about these murders. The proper way to think about it is the change in thinking post-attack, and its impact on society.

I think the Paris attacks were as traumatic to the French and Parisians as 9/11 was to New Yorkers. To me the impact was very similar.

What did the United States do after 9/11? It launched a military response. And France is now engaged in a military response.

I was very involved in working on threat finance with the U.S. intelligence community after 9/11. I describe it in chapter 1 of my book The Death of Money and also in the first two chapters of my first book Currency Wars.

We saw a couple of things…

First, just a few weeks after 9/11 Osama bin Laden was videotaped — and I'm sure he knew he was being videotaped — discussing the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks with his other sheiks. He considered it an economic attack. He was interested in how much the stock market went down.

Bin Laden came from one of the wealthiest families in Saudi Arabia. He had education and financial sophistication. He was a bit of an entrepreneur when he was living in Sudan in the 1990's before he went to Afghanistan. He was financing his operations with honey farms and transportation companies. He was very financially savvy. And he viewed 9/11 as a financial attack.