Don Pittis, senior producer of CBC News Business.

It was called the shot heard 'round the world.

The imperial nephew from one of the world's greatest empires was gunned down by a Serbian political dissident. Austria declared war on Serbia, and then every country in Europe piled on, along with their colonies, creating the First World War.

By the time the war was over, the world had changed.

The United States had stepped forward to become an acknowledged world power. The British Empire had begun to crumble. The Austro-Hungarian empire of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose death had started the whole shmozzle, had disappeared. So had Imperial Russia. And some 15 million young men had died in the mud of Europe.

So did shooting a comic opera Archduke with an improbable mustache cause all that? If the war hadn't happened, would the status quo have persisted? Or were there forces building in the world that made all those changes inevitable? Many hours and many litres of beer have been consumed in student lounges over such questions.

The reason this is of special interest today is that we may be watching something similar happen now.

In other words, did the property market crash cause the chaos we are facing now? Or was it just a trigger for something inevitable? And are there bigger changes to come?

Chaos often creates opportunity

The fact is that power structures seldom accept change easily. As Naomi Klein says in her book The Shock Doctrine, chaos often creates the opportunity for change. She is convinced most of that change favours the strong against the weak.

A case can be made that new forces have been building in the world that have been waiting for the current shock, like the strains in the earth's crust that build and build and then are released in a sudden shudder of relief.

Before the First World War, many different forces were also building. Nationalism was straining against the gravity of empire. Ideologies of socialism and democracy were butting up against an old social order. The United States was growing out of its role as a second class citizen among the powers of Europe. Gradually, America had been transforming itself from a frontier society into a financial, industrial, technical and intellectual powerhouse. WWI was America's coming-out ball.

Despite Naomi Klein's take, transformations don't always hurt the little guy. The collapse at the end of America's Gilded Age levelled incomes and may have prevented the country from developing a European-style aristocracy. The New Deal tried to do something similar in the 1930s creating a sense of social responsibility that hadn't existed before.

Will it last?

It is still too early to be certain whether what we are facing now is just another once-a-decade economic slowdown, or something more transformative. But as newly appointed U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushes her reset button with Russia, the world economic collapse may be doing something similar to the rest of us.

Are the U.S. car companies just going through a bad patch, or is their growth model fundamentally flawed in the face of foreign competition? A similar question can be asked about the about the global banking system.

Is China chafing at its role as a Third World factory with cheap labour? Is the country arriving at its coming-out ball the way the U.S. did 90 years ago? Is the U.S. going through a minor economic realignment to get its house in order, or is it facing the kind of too-big-for-its-britches transformation that the British Empire experienced?

Is the oil and gas industry just in the midst of a temporary slowdown, or is the war on climate change about to create a permanent shift in the way we use carbon fuels? Does the U.S. dollar deserve its place as the world's reserve currency or is it going the way of the English guinea or the Austro-Hungarian Crown?

It is a truism that markets don't like uncertainty. And big uncertainty is worse than small. The shudder of relief that ends a tectonic buildup is called an earthquake. Until we are sure that we are not in the middle of that kind of transformation, expect markets to remain nervous.