The subprime crisis is often explained in terms of trust: one day trust between financial counterparties vanished and here was a crisis. Explanations in terms of “market confidence” refer in fact to two distinct phenomena, one being indeed trust and the other one being more plainly straightforward profitability. Let me start with profitability. Subprime loans…

I’m happy with the way things worked out yesterday, March 8th, at the UCLA Complexity Science Conference with my paper: The Subprime Crisis: A Human Complex Systems Phenomenon.

Of course, trying to squeeze the whole crisis into an hour (1 ¼ with John Bragin’s express permission), it turned out I had much too much…

I’ve mentioned already in Agents using financial models and the “human cognitive cocktail” a number of pitfalls linked to the task of modeling the subprime crisis in a Human Complex Systems perspective, especially those related to agents’ partial understanding of the models they’re using or in errors they’re making when using them. I’ve…