The financial crisis of 2008, which started with an initially well-defined epicenter focused on mortgage backed securities (MBS), has been cascading into a global economic recession, whose increasing severity and uncertain duration has led and is continuing to lead to massive losses and damage...

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...

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...

We propose a new set of stylized facts quantifying the structure of financial markets. The key idea is to study the combined structure of both investment strategies and prices in order to open a qualitatively new level of understanding of financial and economic markets. We study the detailed...

We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing since 2007 have clear origins, namely in the delusionary belief in the merits of policies based on a “perpetual money machine” type of thinking. Indeed, we document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has...

We introduce the Speculative Influence Network (SIN) to decipher the causal relationships between sectors (and/or firms) during financial bubbles. The SIN is constructed in two steps. First, we develop a Hidden Markov Model (HMM) of regime-switching between a normal market phase represented by a...

Using an agent-based model (ABM) with fundamentalists and chartists, prone to develop bubbles and crashes, we demonstrate the usefulness of direct market intervention by a policy maker, documenting strong performance in preventing bubbles and drawdowns and augmenting significantly the welfare of...

We analyse the consequences of predicting and exploiting financial bubbles in an agent-based model, with a risky and a risk-free asset and three different trader types: fundamentalists, noise traders and "dragon riders" (DR). The DR exploit their ability to diagnose financial bubbles from the...

Inspired by the question of identifying the start time τ of financial bubbles, we address the calibration of time series in which the inception of the latest regime of interest is unknown. By taking into account the tendency of a given model to overfit data, we introduce the Lagrange...