36 THE BiG DROP
an avalanche, which is true. But not every snowflake does.
A lot of snowflakes fall harmlessly, except that they make
the ultimate avalanche worse because they’re building up the
snow pack. Then, when one of them hits the wrong way, and
starts an avalanche, it cascades out of control.
Sometimes people have this idea that all geopolitical
events are little things. They mistakenly believe they should be
waiting for a massive event that will trigger the next crisis with
a bang. That’s actually not good science.
The way to think about the trigger for the next crisis is that
it might not look that different from the little things. All that is
necessary to trigger the crisis is for an event to react with the
system the wrong way. If an event happens on a bad day or
when markets were leaning a certain way, — that could be the
straw that breaks the camel’s back.
The straw that breaks the camel’s back is not different than
all the other straw. It’s just that it was at the tipping point, and
one piece of straw broke the camel. Likewise, one snowflake
starts an avalanche... and one small event can trigger a crisis.
The one thing that causes the big drop might not be that
different than the events we’ve seen already. Except that the
system is getting more and more unstable, and it might not
take that much to make it collapse.■ Market Collapse
The fifth scenario is a market collapse. This is something that
would happen very suddenly and unexpectedly. The forces of
inflation and deflation that I wrote about take a while to play
out, but this collapse could happen very suddenly and catch in-
vestors completely unaware. We’ve come within hours or days
of total global financial gridlock and total market collapse in
the last 16 years.
Everyone knows about the 2008 crisis. People have a