Amid the current financial crisis, there has been one equity index beating all others: the Shanghai Composite. Our analysis of this main Chinese equity index shows clear signatures of a bubble build up and we go on to predict its most likely crash date: July 17-27, 2009 (20%/80% quantile...

In the aftermath of the burst of the ``new economy'' bubble in 2000, the Federal Reserve aggressively reduced short-term rates yields in less than two years from 6.5% to 1.25% in an attempt to coax forth a stronger recovery of the US economy. But, there is growing apprehension that this is...

We present a novel analysis extending the recent work of Mizuno et al. [2002] on the hyperinflations of Germany (1920/1/1-1923/11/1), Hungary (1945/4/30-1946/7/15), Brazil (1969-1994), Israel (1969-1985), Nicaragua (1969-1991), Peru (1969-1990) and Bolivia (1969-1985). On the basis of a...

We present an analysis of oil prices in US$ and in other major currencies that diagnoses unsustainable faster-than-exponential behavior. This supports the hypothesis that the recent oil price run-up has been amplified by speculative behavior of the type found during a bubble-like expansion. We...

Following our previous investigation of the USA Standard and Poor index anti-bubble that started in August 2000, we analyze thirty eight world stock market indices and identify 21 anti-bubble. An ``anti-bubble'' is defined as a self-fulfilling decreasing price created by positive price-to-price...

We present a systematic algorithm testing for the existence of collective self-organization in the behavior of agents in social systems, with a concrete empirical implementation on the Dow Jones Industrial Average index (DJIA) over the 20th century and on Hong Kong Hang Seng composite index...

Our analysis of financial data, in terms of super-exponential growth, suggests that the seed of the 2002/03 crisis of the Dutch supermarket giant AHOLD was planted in 1996. It became quite visible in 1999 when the post-bubble destabilization regime was well-developed and acted as the precursor...

We introduce a novel non-parametric methodology to test for the dynamical time evolution of the lag-lead structure between two arbitrary time series. The method consists in constructing a distance matrix based on the matching of all sample data pairs between the two time series. Then, the...

A remarkable similarity in the behavior of the US S&P500 index from 1996 to August 2002 and of the Japanese Nikkei index from 1985 to 1992 (11 years shift) is presented, with particular emphasis on the structure of the bearish phases. Extending a previous analysis of Johansen and Sornette [1999,...

Previous analyses of a large ensemble of stock markets have demonstrated that a log-periodic power law (LPPL) behavior of the prices constitutes a qualifying signature of speculative bubbles that often land with a crash. We detect such a LPPL signature in the foreign capital inflow during the...