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 review a resent {\em time-dependent} performance measure for economical time series -- the (optimal) investment horizon approach. For stock indices, the approach shows a pronounced gain-loss asymmetry that is {\em not} observed for the individual stocks that comprise the index. This...

Inverse statistics in economics is considered. We argue that the natural candidate for such statistics is the investment horizons distribution. This distribution of waiting times needed to achieve a predefined level of return is obtained from (often detrended) historic asset prices. Such a...

In stochastic finance, one traditionally considers the return as a competitive measure of an asset, {\it i.e.}, the profit generated by that asset after some fixed time span $\Delta t$, say one week or one year. This measures how well (or how bad) the asset performs over that given period of...

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...

In a recent preprint (Dialog in e-mail traffic, preprint cond-mat/0304433), the temporal dynamics of an e-mail network has been investigated by Eckmann, Moses and Sergi. Specifically, the time period between an e-mail message and its reply were recorded. It will be shown here that their data...

A new experiment measuring the dynamical response of the Internet population to a “point-like” perturbation has been performed. The nature of the perturbation was that of an announcement, specifically a web-interview on stock market crashes, which contained the URL to the author's articles...