We argue that the present crisis and stalling economy continuing 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 smaller...

This short review presents a selected history of the mutual fertilization between physics and economics, from Isaac Newton and Adam Smith to the present. The fundamentally different perspectives embraced in theories developed in financial economics compared with physics are dissected with the...

We investigate how the choice of decision makers can be varied under the presence of risk and uncertainty. Our analysis is based on the approach we have previously applied to individual decision makers, which we now generalize to the case of decision makers that are members of a society. The...

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 Minority, Majority and Dollar Games (MG, MAJG, $G), synthetic agents compete for rewards, at each time-step acting in accord with the previously best-performing of their limited sets of strategies. Different components and/or aspects of real-world financial markets are modelled by these...

Using the framework of factor models, we establish the general expression of the coefficient of tail dependence between the market and a stock (i.e., the probability that the stock incurs a large loss, assuming that the market has also undergone a large loss) as a function of the parameters of...

We present a set of models of the main stylized facts of market price fluctuations. These models comprise dynamical evolution with threshold dynamics and Langevin price equation with multiplicative noise, percolation models to describe the interaction between traders and hierarchical cascade...

A large consensus now seems to take for granted that the distributions of empirical returns of financial time series are regularly varying, with a tail exponent close to 3. We revisit this results and use standard tests as well as develop a battery of new non-parametric and parametric tests (in...

Econophysics embodies the recent upsurge of interest by physicists into financial economics, driven by the availability of large amount of data, job shortage in physics and the possibility of applying many-body techniques developed in statistical and theoretical physics to the understanding of...

Based on a recent theorem due to the authors, it is shown how the extreme tail dependence between an asset and a factor or index or between two assets can be easily calibrated. Portfolios constructed with stocks with minimal tail dependence with the market exhibit a remarkable degree of...