Increases in global food prices have led to widespread hunger and social unrest---and an imperative to understand their causes. In a previous paper published in September 2011, we constructed for the first time a dynamic model that quantitatively agreed with food prices. Specifically, the model...

Recent increases in basic food prices are severely impacting vulnerable populations worldwide. Proposed causes such as shortages of grain due to adverse weather, increasing meat consumption in China and India, conversion of corn to ethanol in the US, and investor speculation on commodity markets...

High and volatile global food prices have led to food riots and played a critical role in triggering the Arab Spring revolutions in recent years. The severe drought in the US in the summer of 2012 led to a new increase in food prices. Through the fall, they remained at a threshold above which...

Recent increases in basic food prices are severely impacting vulnerable populations worldwide. Proposed causes such as shortages of grain due to adverse weather, increasing meat consumption in China and India, conversion of corn to ethanol in the US, and investor speculation on commodity markets...

The dynamic network of relationships among corporations underlies cascading economic failures including the current economic crisis, and can be inferred from correlations in market value fluctuations. We analyze the time dependence of the network of correlations to reveal the changing...

Why do a market's prices move up or down? Claims about causes are made without actual information, and accepted or dismissed based upon poor or non-existent evidence. Here we investigate the price movements that ended with Apple stock closing at \$500.00 on January 18, 2013. There is a ready...

We provide direct evidence of market manipulation at the beginning of the financial crisis in November 2007. The type of manipulation, a "bear raid," would have been prevented by a regulation that was repealed by the Securities and Exchange Commission in July 2007. The regulation, the uptick...

During the last two years, Europe has been facing a debt crisis, and Greece has been at its center. In response to the crisis, drastic actions have been taken, including the halving of Greek debt. Policy makers acted because interest rates for sovereign debt increased dramatically. High interest...

Social unrest may reflect a variety of factors such as poverty, unemployment, and social injustice. Despite the many possible contributing factors, the timing of violent protests in North Africa and the Middle East in 2011 as well as earlier riots in 2008 coincides with large peaks in global...

We present a non-naive version of the Precautionary (PP) that allows us to avoid paranoia and paralysis by confining precaution to specific domains and problems. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge...