The financial upsets of the past two decades, and especially the East Asian crisis of the late 1990s, have yielded amass of new information and spurred a great deal of activity under each of these headings.
But we are the only species to have defined a geological period by our activity something usually performed by major glaciations, mass extinction and the colossal impact of objects from outer space, like the one that defines the upper boundary of the Cretaceous.
Regardless of what the source was for the activity, what you had was a collision of demand and capital that led to a critical mass, an explosion growth of innovation and production.