In his memoir of the 2008 financial crisis, former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner wrote that such crises are like “earthquakes”—they “cannot be reliably predicted, so they cannot be reliably prevented.” Former Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke ’75 seemed to share that view when he said in a May 2016 talk that the Great Recession was triggered by “a twenty-first-century electronic panic by institutions…an old-fashioned run [on the banks] in new clothes.” And former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson, M.B.A. ’70, said in a 2018 symposium at the Brookings Institution that such crises are “unpredictable in terms of cause, timing, or the severity when they hit.” But what if all these policymakers are wrong?