When small countries crash -- Sinking Scotland -- Caribbean follies -- Austria, credit-anstalt and the Great Depression -- When Finland almost failed -- Albanian pyramid schemes -- Volcanoes, Icelandic banks, and McDonald's -- Ireland's time of troubles -- Acropolis now -- Conclusion.

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different,possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patternssimultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decisionmaking. In this paper we present a simple...