We present a synthesis of all the available empirical evidence in the light of recent theoretical developments for the existence of characteristic log-periodic signatures of growing bubbles in a variety of markets including 8 unrelated crashes from 1929 to 1998 on stock markets as diverse as the...

Twenty-two significant bubbles followed by large crashes or by severe corrections in the Argentinian, Brazilian, Chilean, Mexican, Peruvian, Venezuelan, Hong-Kong, Indonesian, Korean, Malaysian, Philippine and Thai stock markets indices are identified and analysed for log-periodic signatures...

Contrary to common belief, both the Earth's human population and its economic output have grown faster than exponential, i.e., in a super-Malthusian mode, for most of the known history. These growth rates are compatible with a spontaneous singularity occurring at the same critical time 2052±10...

We propose that large stock market crashes are analogous to critical points studied in statistical physics with log-periodic correction to scaling. We extend our previous renormalization group model of stock market prices prior to and after crashes (D. Sornette, A. Johansen, J.P. Bouchaud, J....

We follow up our previous conjecture that large stock market crashes are analogous to critical points in statistical physics. The term “critical” refers to regimes of cooperative behavior, such as magnetism at the Curie temperature and liquid–gas transitions, and is characterized by the...

We describe an experiment on the dynamical response of the internaut population surfing the World-Wide-Web to a Dirac-like perturbation, specifically how the popularity of a web site evolves and relaxes as a function of time in response to the publication of a notice/advertisement in a...

We study a rational expectation model of bubbles and crashes. The model has two components: (1) our key assumption is that a crash may be caused by local self-reinforcing imitation between noise traders. If the tendency for noise traders to imitate their nearest neighbors increases up to a...

We argue that the word ``critical'' in the title is not purely literary. Based on our and other previous work on nonlinear complex dynamical systems, we summarize present evidence, on the Oct. 1929, Oct. 1987, Oct. 1987 Hong-Kong, Aug. 1998 global market events and on the 1985 Forex event, for...

The Nasdaq Composite fell another $\approx 10 %$ on Friday the 14'th of April 2000 signaling the end of a remarkable speculative high-tech bubble starting in spring 1997. The closing of the Nasdaq Composite at 3321 corresponds to a total loss of over 35% since its all-time high of 5133 on the...

We present an analysis of the time behavior of the S&P 500 (Standard and Poors) New York stock exchange index before and after the October 1987 market crash and identify precursory patterns as well as aftershock signatures and characteristic oscillations of relaxation. Combined, they all suggest...