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Why Our Financial System Is Like the Titanic

March 15, 2016

Why Our Financial System Is Like the Titanic 

The “unsinkable” global financial system is rushing headlong toward its encounter with the iceberg.


Why did the Titanic sink, despite being considered unsinkable? The conventional answer is the design of its watertight compartments was flawed: the watertight bulkheads were limited in height to a few feet above the waterline.

The ship was designed such that if the first few compartments were flooded, the flooding would be contained by the watertight bulkheads.

But the iceberg ripped open a gash almost a third the ship’s length, flooding the first six compartments. As the ship’s bow sank, water poured over the bulkhead into the seventh compartment, and so on, until the ship’s bow sank deep enough to bring the ship almost vertical, at which point the hull broke roughly in half–hence the two hull sections discovered on the bottom of the Atlantic in 1985.

But further analysis has revealed this isn’t the only reason Titanic sank. It turned out the ship’s hull plates were brittle due to high sulfur content in the steel, especially at cold temperatures (the water was near freezing at the time of the wreck).

Causes and Effects of the Rapid Sinking of the Titanic

Rather than deform as the iceberg scraped against the hull, the plates and rivets fractured, opening the gash that sank the ship.

The technologies of the early 1900s enabled shipbuilders to construct enormous ships almost 900 feet in length capable of steaming at 24 knots, transporting passengers across the Atlantic in comfort, but the technologies that made such ships and transits low risk were not yet developed.

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