A biased view of a few possible components when reflecting on the present decade financial and economic crisis

TL;DR

This paper explores the similarities between current and past financial crises, emphasizing the importance of information flow delays and modeling approaches like econophysics to understand and predict such rare economic events.

Contribution

It introduces a simulation model for business cycles considering information delays and discusses the role of market manipulation and data interpretation in financial crises.

Findings

Patterns like business cycles can be modeled within a statistical physics framework

Time delays in information flow significantly impact market dynamics

Simulation models can describe self-organized and provoked crashes

Abstract

Is the present economic and financial crisis similar to some previous one? It would be so nice to prove that universality laws exist for predicting such rare events under a minimum set of realistic hypotheses. First, I briefly recall whether patterns, like business cycles, are indeed found, and can be modeled within a statistical physics, or econophysics, framework. I point to a simulation model for describing such so called business cycles, under exo- and endo-genous conditions I discuss self-organized and provoked crashes and their predictions. I emphasize the role of an of- ten forgotten ingredient: the time delay in the information flow. I wonder about the information content of financial data, its mis-interpretation and market manipulation.