We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy that have been ongoing since 2007 are rooted in the delusionary belief in policies based on a "perpetual money machine" type of thinking. We document strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by...

Purpose: Many governments are taking measures in support of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) to mitigate the economic impact of the COVID-19 outbreak. This paper presents a theoretical model for evaluating various government measures, including insurance for bank loans, interest rate...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set -up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

A vast literature investigating behavioural underpinnings of financial bubbles and crashes relies on laboratory experiments. However, it is not yet clear how findings generated in a highly artificial environment relate to the human behaviour in the wild. It is of concern that the laboratory...

To study coordination in complex social systems such as financial markets, the authors introduce a new prediction market set-up that accounts for fundamental uncertainty. Nonetheless, the market is designed so that its total value is known, and thus its rationality can be evaluated. In two...

We introduce the concept of "negative bubbles" as the mirror image of standard financial bubbles, in which positive feedback mechanisms may lead to transient accelerating price falls. To model these negative bubbles, we adapt the Johansen-Ledoit-Sornette (JLS) model of rational expectation...

Inspired by the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and its consequences on the global financial system, we develop a simple model in which the Lehman default event is quantified as having an almost immediate effect in worsening the credit worthiness of all financial institutions in the economic...

By combining (i) the economic theory of rational expectation bubbles, (ii) behavioral finance on imitation and herding of investors and traders and (iii) the mathematical and statistical physics of bifurcations and phase transitions, the log-periodic power law (LPPL) model has been developed as...

We propose two rational expectation models of transient financial bubbles with heterogeneous arbitrageurs and positive feedbacks leading to self-reinforcing transient stochastic faster-than-exponential price dynamics. As a result of the nonlinear feedbacks, the termination of a bubble is found...