We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy that have been ongoing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a "perpetual money machine" type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by...

Using the mechanics of creep in material sciences as a metaphor, we present a general framework to understand the evolution of financial, economic and social systems and to construct scenarios for the future. In a nutshell, highly non-linear out-of-equilibrium systems subjected to exogenous...

We present a plausible micro-founded model for the previously postulated power law finite time singular form of the crash hazard rate in the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette model of rational expectation bubbles. The model is based on a percolation picture of the network of traders and the concept that...

We propose a new paradigm to study coordination in complex social systems, such as financial markets, that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. This new context has features from prediction markets that have been shown previously to mitigate price bubbles in classical asset market experiments....

We present a detailed methodological study of the application of the modified profile likelihood method for the calibration of nonlinear financial models characterised by a large number of parameters. We apply the general approach to the Log-Periodic Power Law Singularity (LPPLS) model of...

Financial bubbles are subject to debate and controversy. However, they are not well understood and are hardly ever characterised specifically, especially ex ante. We define a bubble as a period of unsustainable growth, when the price of an asset increases ever more quickly, in a series of...

We investigate the distributions of e-drawdowns and e-drawups of the most liquid futures financial contracts of the world at time scales of 30 seconds. The e-drawdowns (resp. e-drawups) generalise the notion of runs of negative (resp. positive) returns so as to capture the risks to which...