A revolution in her mind occurred one evening, as she was drinking her green tea lazily preparing to go to bed. As usual, she had her TV set on, with sound off. The caption, Economic Review, appeared on the screen. Nina rarely listened to such shows – there was too much incompetence and lies to them – but this time she turned the sound on without much interest.
The host, a sleek character with shifty eyes, started putting questions to an equally sleek interlocutor who was introduced as an expert on global finances. Nina listened to their babble for a minute and was about to turn it off when she heard something that made her hand with the remote control in it freeze.
The expert on global finances spoke on the prospects for the next year. Most experts’ forecasts – including his own – were optimistic; the world was in for growth in every way. “True, sometimes different opinions are voiced,” added the speaking head on the screen. “For instance, the Nobel prize-winner in economics Bartholomew Mattiasson is predicting a global financial crisis. Well, what can I say…” The head smiled condescendingly. “We should take into account that professor Mattiasson won the prize forty years ago, and he is ninety-two now.”
Nina even got up from her chair. That was what Samsonov and she had not reckoned with – the possibility of a global economic crisis. All their estimates were based on a certain forecast of the economic growth of the country, with due margins allowed for unpredictable variations. Both the basic forecast and margins, computed and re-computed by various methods, were quite sound, but… But all of them relied on the fundamental global trends projected into the next few years. Those trends were universally accepted – all the leading expert institutes and rating agencies were unanimous about that. A major global economic crisis was as unlikely as the collision with an asteroid.
But what if the institutes and agencies were wrong?
Nina had never bothered herself with issues of global economy, and now she did not know even where to start. She tried the Internet. The query, “global crisis”, brought back an incredible amount of all sorts of rubbish: prophecies by ancient and modern visionaries, including those by Nostradamus; astrologers’ predictions; insane fantasies of an imminent apocalypse spread by the leaders of various cults; and almost as nonsensical twaddle by politicians.
Little by little, sifting tons of such stuff, Nina found what she was after. As it turned out, the elderly professor Mattiasson was not the only one to believe in a global crisis; some other economists predicted one, too. There were not many of them, and their voices evoked little response – the world was not eager to listen to bad news.
The alarmists approached the crisis issue in their separate ways, each focusing on their own piece of the general picture. The problem was that no satisfactory model of the global economy was available – nobody knew how to describe the enormous multitude of factors, disparate in nature and direction, as well as the ocean of individual human wills, chaotic on the surface of it while hiding in its depth the force fields of global control whose origins were a total mystery. As long as things were going on smoothly, any schoolboy could come up with an adequate forecast. But a major crisis – an economic collapse – nobody could predict to any degree of certainty; in fact, such predictions were no better than fortune-telling by tea leaves.
However, the heralds of crisis infected Nina with their concern. What if a global crisis was actually going to break out? What if it was going to occur not in some remote future but this year already?
Nina was surfing the Internet for whole days now. As a whale filters tons of ocean water to obtain plankton, Nina was running through her brain huge volumes of vacuous information to filter out facts that could be relevant to the possibility of a global crisis.
After a week of such whale work, she already had an idea of the main problem spots of the global economy. Despite apparent well-being, things actually were not going at all well – ignored for decades, the global economic problems were aggravating, and multi-billion financial bubbles were brewing which were bound to burst sooner or later.
There was nothing new about all that, and there were known counter-arguments that seemed to explain everything. Life on credit and systematic procrastination of dealing with problems had its proponents who wrote books, ran university courses and talked on TV shows. “Everything’s going to be all right,” they said. “Market will regulate everything on its own.”
The optimistic forecasts were groundless logically and clearly motivated politically, but one simple fact spoke for them: with all its crying problems, the global economy had been growing more or less steadily for many years, so why not go on growing?
Nina did not count on being smarter than all of the world’s best economists put together. Still, she hoped in her heart that her intuition which had helped her out many times before would do the trick again. But her intuition kept silent – apparently, the global problems were just beyond it.
That was a deadlock. The global economy showed all the prerequisites for a crisis but paradoxically, instead of a crisis, that might result in another couple of decades of accelerated growth. And if a crisis was to break out, there was no telling when that was going to happen. Nobody had anything more sensible to say on that, and neither had Nina Shuvalova who happened to take interest in global problems as she was dying of idleness and love-sickness in her one-room apartment.
What could she say to Samsonov? That they should make allowances for a crisis which might, or might not, happen? But that kind of strategy had its price as excessive caution reduced the profit margin of the project. What arguments could she offer to justify such sacrifices? None whatsoever. And anyway, there was only one week left before the tender due date, so it was probably too late to change anything.
After sitting up late into another night over a pile of dissimilar, controversial materials, Nina turned off the computer, saying aloud: “That’s enough, it doesn’t make any sense.”
She went to bed, but the global economy with its unfathomable problems kept her awake for another hour and then penetrated her sleep. In her dream, she met with professor Mattiasson who had the appearance of a gnome wearing a long white beard. Gnome Mattiasson was sitting on a heap of gold coins, looking very sad. The reason was that the coins were rapidly turning into cow’s droppings. Pointing at that disgrace with his crooked finger, Mattiasson said: “For shame, Nina! I counted on you so!”
On waking up, Nina slipped on her robe, groped for her slippers with her feet and, following her morning ritual, walked to the window to see what the weather was like. Like Nina, the sun was up late; its oblique rays were neither bright nor warm. Nina opened the window to let in the morning cold, and peeped out.
A near autumn could be felt in the air. On a brick ledge close by, a ruffled-up pigeon was sitting, waiting for the sun finally to warm it up.
“A global crisis is coming. It’s a matter of weeks at the latest,” Nina suddenly said aloud.
The pigeon squinted at her suspiciously.
Nina was startled much worse than the frozen pigeon. She stood there for a while, holding on to the window handle and trying to figure out whether it was she who had said those words, and whether something else was going to follow.
There followed a revelation.
It was like solving a puzzle of the type where an image – such as a huntsman with a dog – is hidden among a deliberate chaos of spots and lines. Peering at such a picture, one gets annoyed at first at not being able to make out anything, and then suddenly sees the huntsman and wonders how they could not see it just a second ago. It was the same way with Nina and the global economy. The night before she had not been able to make out anything in the tangle of economic problems, and now she saw the approaching crisis quite clearly. The crisis was huge, it was going to rock the whole world, and it was just about to burst out.