On the first anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush came to ground zero in lower Manhattan to solemnly commemorate the tragedy. As far as I know he never did anything like that again, and this year on the anniversary President Obama didn't do anything in particular.

But this week Obama did travel to ground zero to commemorate the first anniversary of the fall of Lehman Brothers. I guess presidents have short memories. I guess we all do.

I say all this with more than irony. To me, there's more than a calendar coincidence that relates the terrorist attacks to the Lehman collapse. Investors would be wise to understand the connection.

It's key for investors to understand that when something previously thought to be "impossible" actually happens, it changes the world, and makes other impossible things suddenly possible. Investors need to get correctly positioned for the newly possible.

But that's not easy -- most of us aren't like the queen in Alice in Wonderland who brags, "sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

As impossible as it was when that first airliner struck the first World Trade Center tower, minutes later something even more impossible happened -- another airliner hit the other tower. Then, within just two hours, both towers totally collapsed.

And perhaps the most impossible aspect of the whole thing is how few people died , considering how bad it might have been. When I saw the two towers in flames on television, I told myself "50 thousand." The actual death toll was 2,995.

Same thing with Lehman. The impossible led to even more impossibles. Forty-eight hours after Lehman fell, AIG did too. Days later, Washington Mutual. Then Wachovia. Within months, Citigroup and Bank of America were on the brink, as well.

And here, too, the financial equivalent of the death toll is far less that it might have been. At the worst of the banking crisis in the wake of Lehman's demise, it seemed the entire world financial system was going to stop functioning.

But somehow, impossibly, it didn't.

This sequence of impossibilities set in motion by Lehman was totally exploitable by investors who could see the impossible becoming suddenly possible. Nobody remembers it now -- and you're going to find this so impossible you're going to want to look it up to prove it to yourself -- but in the week after Lehman fell, financial stocks (as represented by the S&P Financial Sector index) actually rallied by a whopping 9.9%. That's because nobody was willing to believe the impossible -- after back-to-back collapses of Lehman and AIG, things just couldn't get worse.

But the impossible was possible. Things did get worse, and fast. In the following month -- that is, the month after that 9.9% rally -- financial stocks dropped 29.4%. And that was just the beginning. By the bottom in March, financial stocks had fallen 70.6%.

The impossibilities are still happening, right here, right now. Since the bottom in March, the financial sector has rallied 149.6%. No -- that's not the impossible part. The impossible part is that, after that massive rally, the sector is still 57.3% below its highs in late 2007.

Here's another impossibility. From the bottom in March through the recovery high Wednesday -- just 191 days -- the S&P 500 has rallied 57.9%. That's simply stunning for an index as diversified and stodgy as the S&P 500.

It's only happened twice before in history, both times right after the very bottom of the Great Depression in 1932. OK, stocks are entitled to that kind of bounceback after they've fallen 86.2% (yes, believe it or not, that's how much they fell in the Depression). But in our recent bear market, stocks didn't fall anything close to that.

So can this rally continue? Impossible, I say. Buy hey -- this is the time when the impossible is possible. So who knows. I can tell you that most of my clients, the best and the brightest institutional investors, are all raving bulls.

They say I'm crazy for doubting that this rally can continue. Actually, they're just being polite -- they think I'm stupid, not crazy. So far at least, they're right -- this thing just keeps on going.

Another issue about which I sharply differ with my clients is inflation. I remember after the impossible terrorist attacks, the US did an impossibly inane thing a year and half later -- we attacked, in retaliation, a country that seemingly had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks in the first place. We said we thought it was possible they had weapons of mass destruction. Turned out to be impossible to find them.

What impossibly inane thing is our wise government doing now, in the aftermath of the impossible collapse of Lehman? It's trying to borrow and inflate our way back to prosperity. The Fed is stuck at a zero or near-zero interest rate as far as the eye can see. It's balance sheet has swollen to three times its size of a year ago.

And yet I don't know anyone who thinks it's anything but impossible that all that will lead to serious inflation. They thought it was impossible for inflation-sensitive gold to go above $1,000, which is did last week. I've been predicting that particular impossibility for quite a while -- and the more I think about it, the more I think it could go to $2,000.

With such low interest rates and with the Fed printing so much money, why is it impossible to believe that gold will surge, anticipating the kind of high inflation rates we had in the 1970s and early 1980s? That kind of inflation -- with the CPI getting as high as 14.75% in 1980 -- happened once, so why can't it happen again now? Rates weren't even zero then -- and they are now.

I'm not exactly predicting that. But I think it's possible. Admit it -- it's not impossible, is it? What probability shall we give it -- 10%? That's actually a high probability, considering that most people think it should be zero -- that it's utterly impossible.

Once you admit that a hyper-inflation like 14.75% is at least possible in our future, it opens your mind a bit -- suddenly a high inflation rate like, say, 8% becomes something that doesn't seem too outlandish. Maybe gold goes to $1,300. But believe me, there is nobody who thinks that even 8% inflation is going to happen, or that gold is going to $1,300.

I think it will. Or at least that's the seventh impossible thing I'm believing before breakfast.