Allow me to pose you a question as old as time itself:
“If you could time travel, where would you go, and what would you do?”
Earnest and imaginative folk such as team Epic Win ask these questions hoping for an answer along the lines of, “I’d hunt a T-Rex in the prehistoric jungle, then bring back its head as proof of my victory over nature” or “I’d go back to the middle ages and teach them about electricity, thereby advancing the human civilisation from whence I journeyed a thousand years.”
Sadly the typical boring answer spat back in your hopeful, earnest face is something like, “I’d go back to the eighties and buy up Microsoft stock.”
Brilliant. Well, I’m glad I bestowed the gift of inter-dimensional travel on you. Can’t wait to see how many thousands of pounds you make. Probably enough to buy a porsche you can sleep in once your sexy young wife leaves you for the pool-boy and takes the house, you joy-stifling buffoon.
Frustrating as they are, these ‘travel back a small distance, buy up stock, get moderately rich’ plans seem to be at the front of everyone’s mind. It got me thinking, a smart plan might, for example, be to travel back to 1990, buy up lots of AOL stock and sell it all off a week or so before the first dot-com crash. (I like calling it the ‘first’ dot-com crash just to keep everyone on their toes) That would be a good idea, right?
Well, now let’s imagine you’re one of those bold investment-frontier men, stood on the trading floor with your head held high, and your keen young eyes trained on the stock ticker. Y’know, that big numbery display like in Wall Street. Suddenly you’re informed that a chunk of AOL stock has been sold. Not a big chunk by any means, but it strikes you as odd because everyone in their right mind is buying AOL stock. “Why would you sell now, when stock prices are still rising?” You ask yourself. Perhaps you stroke your stubble pensively. Perhaps you remember your father back on the farm, rake in hand, stooping to pick up a grain of wheat and then holding it up to the dawn sunrise. You recall his wisdom, his words of prudence and hear them ring clearly in your mind. You remember his firm hand on your shoulder, and his broad smile when you told him you’d made it onto your big-city accounting course, and his parting words to you, not to forget who you are, and not to get caught up in the big-city pursuit of quick money and easy living.
You know that it’s best to err on the side of caution.
You sell your own AOL stock — the investors won’t like it, but dammit you always knew this Internet thing was a flash in the pan, you’re not going to be one of the yuppies who ruins themselves on a temporary fad. The other traders see your bold movements and start selling their own AOL stock. Within hours the market is in chaos. It is the end of the dot-com dream. Switching now back to you, it’s clear that you’re responsible, you time-travelling sneak, you sold your stock when everyone else was buying, causing a chain reaction that crashed the whole damn system.
So is it not possible that:
Every economic crash in history has been caused by time-travellers popping into the past to make a quick buck?!
Clearly the answer is yes.
I hope I have demonstrated that a) this kind of madness is possible, even probable, b) that I overthink time-travel and that c) I have an incredibly poor understanding of how the economy works.
