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...

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...

Episodes of market crashes have fascinated economists for centuries. Although many academics, practitioners and policy makers have studied questions related to collapsing asset price bubbles, there is little consensus yet about their causes and effects. This review and essay evaluates some of...

We introduce a model of super-exponential financial bubbles with two assets (risky and risk-free), in which fundamentalist and chartist traders co-exist. Fundamentalists form expectations on the return and risk of a risky asset and maximize their constant relative risk aversion expected utility...

We present a simple agent-based model to study the development of a bubble and the consequential crash and investigate how their proximate triggering factor might relate to their fundamental mechanism, and vice versa. Our agents invest according to their opinion on future price movements, which...

We present a self-consistent model for explosive financial bubbles, which combines a mean-reverting volatility process and a stochastic conditional return which reflects nonlinear positive feedbacks and continuous updates of the investors' beliefs and sentiments. The conditional expected returns...

In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the GDPs of the US and the eurozone have grown astonishing slowly and have not yet recovered their pre-crisis rates, as of 2016. Here, we argue that, in order to escape further sluggish growth, we need to diagnose the present ailments as rooted in...

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...

We present an extension of the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model to include an additional pricing factor called the "Zipf factor'', which describes the diversification risk of the stock market portfolio. Keeping all the dynamical characteristics of a bubble described in the JLS model, the new...

The Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of rational expectation bubbles with finite-time singular crash hazard rates has been developed to describe the dynamics of financial bubbles and crashes. It has been applied successfully to a large variety of financial bubbles in many different markets....