Will Aliens Trigger The Next Financial Crisis? – OpEd |
As Mark Thornton has detailed in his brilliant book, The Skyscraper Curse, Austrian School economists’ unique theory of the business cycle has given them a distinct advantage in foreseeing oncoming economic crises: from Ludwig von Mises’s 1920s predictions of looming bank failures, to Thornton’s own 2004 warnings of the housing bubble and its consequences. Contemporary Austrians continue to apply this theory when scrutiniing the anxious landscape of today’s economy, looking for early warning signs of where central bank monetary manipulation will manifest itself next.
However, depending on the course which history takes, we may someday look back and reflect that today’s Austrians were outdone in their prognostications by one Helen McCaw, who has recently warned that the next financial crisis could be triggered by the announcement of the existence of extraterrestrial life.
Ms. McCaw—a former senior analyst at the Bank of England—wrote to the current governor of Britain’s central bank to warn that a supposedly imminent announcement of the existence of advanced alien life might cause extreme uncertainty in financial markets, possibly triggering bank collapses. “The United States government appears to be partway through a multi-year process to declassify and disclose information on the existence of a technologically advanced non-human intelligence responsible for Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena [the official name for UFOs].” McCaw argued that an announcement of the existence of “a power or intelligence greater than any government and with unknown intentions” could “induce ontological shock and provoke psychological responses with material consequences… There might be extreme price volatility in financial markets due........