The financial crisis was precipitated by the mortgage crisis. A whole structure of financial derivatives was based upon the ultimate debtors, the mortgagors. Insofar as the mortgagors were unable to service their debts, the values of the derivatives fell. The financial intermediaries whose...

Holbrook Working (1949) discovered that the percentage change in futures prices seemed to be largelyrandom. This led Paul Samuelson (1965) to develop the Efficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) which claims that the current spot and futures1 prices fully reflect all relevant information. Furthermore,...