Identifying Speculative Bubbles

Identifying Speculative Bubbles
Author: Bradley Jones
Publisher: International Monetary Fund
Total Pages: 49
Release: 2014-11-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1484398270

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In the aftermath of the global financial crisis, the issue of how best to identify speculative asset bubbles (in real-time) remains in flux. This owes to the difficulty of disentangling irrational investor exuberance from the rational response to lower risk based on price behavior alone. In response, I introduce a two-pillar (price and quantity) approach for financial market surveillance. The intuition is straightforward: while asset pricing models comprise a valuable component of the surveillance toolkit, risk taking behavior, and financial vulnerabilities more generally, can also be reflected in subtler, non-price terms. The framework appears to capture stylized facts of asset booms and busts—some of the largest in history have been associated with below average risk premia (captured by the ‘pricing pillar’) and unusually elevated patterns of issuance, trading volumes, fund flows, and survey-based return projections (reflected in the ‘quantities pillar’). Based on a comparison to past boom-bust episodes, the approach is signaling mounting vulnerabilities in risky U.S. credit markets. Policy makers and regulators should be attune to any further deterioration in issuance quality, and where possible, take steps to ensure the post-crisis financial infrastructure is braced to accommodate a re-pricing in credit risk.

Detecting Speculative Bubbles Created in Experiments via Decoupling in Agent Based Models

Detecting Speculative Bubbles Created in Experiments via Decoupling in Agent Based Models
Author: Magda Roszczynska-Kurasinska
Publisher:
Total Pages: 7
Release: 2016
Genre:
ISBN:

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Proving the existence of speculative financial bubbles even a posteriori has proven exceedingly difficult[1-3] so anticipating a speculative bubble ex ante would at first seem an impossible task. Still as illustrated by the recent turmoil in financial markets initiated by the so called quot;subprime crisisquot; there is clearly an urgent need for new tools in our understanding and handling of financial speculative bubbles. In contrast to periods of fast growth, the nature of market dynamics profoundly changes during speculative bubbles where self contained strategies often leads to unconditional buying. A critical question is therefore whether such a signature can be quantified, and if so, used in the understanding of what are the sufficient and necessary conditions in the creation of a speculative bubble.Here we show a new technique, based on agent based simulations, gives a robust measure of detachment of trading choices created by feedback, and predicts the onset of speculative bubbles in experiments with human subjects. We use trading data obtained from experiments with humans as input to computer simulations of artificial agents that use adaptive strategies defined from game theory. As the agents try to maximize their profit using the market data created by humans, we observe certain moments of decoupling where the decision of an agent becomes independent of the next outcome of the human experiment, leading to pockets of deterministic price actions of the agents. Decoupling in the agent based simulations in turn allows us to correctly predict at what time tlt;subgt;blt;/subgt; the subjects in the laboratory experiments have entered a bubble state. Finally in one case where the subjects do not enter a permanent bubble state, our method allow us at certain special moments to predict with a 87% success rate an unit move of the market two time steps ahead.

Bubbles and Crashes

Bubbles and Crashes
Author: Brent Goldfarb
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2019-02-19
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1503607933

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“An interesting take on some factors that facilitate the development and bursting of bubbles in technology industries. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice Financial market bubbles are recurring, often painful, reminders of the costs and benefits of capitalism. While many books have studied financial manias and crises, most fail to compare times of turmoil with times of stability. In Bubbles and Crashes, Brent Goldfarb and David A. Kirsch give us new insights into the causes of speculative booms and busts. They identify a class of assets—major technological innovations—that can, but does not necessarily, produce bubbles. This methodological twist is essential: Only by comparing similar events that sometimes lead to booms and busts can we ascertain the root causes of bubbles. Using a sample of eighty-eight technologies spanning 150 years, Goldfarb and Kirsch find that four factors play a key role in these episodes: the degree of uncertainty surrounding a particular innovation; the attentive presence of novice investors; the opportunity to directly invest in companies that specialize in the technology; and whether or not a technology is a good protagonist in a narrative. Goldfarb and Kirsch consider the implications of their analysis for technology bubbles that may be in the works today, offer tools for investors to identify whether a bubble is happening, and propose policy measures that may mitigate the risks associated with future speculative episodes.

Speculative Bubbles, Speculative Attacks, and Policy Switching

Speculative Bubbles, Speculative Attacks, and Policy Switching
Author: Robert P. Flood
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 528
Release: 1994
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780262061698

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The papers in this book are grouped into three sections: the first on price bubbles is primarily financial; the second on speculative attacks (on exchange rate regimes) is international in scope; and the third, on policy switching, is concerned with monetary policy.

Boom and Bust

Boom and Bust
Author: William Quinn
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2020-08-06
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1108369359

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Why do stock and housing markets sometimes experience amazing booms followed by massive busts and why is this happening more and more frequently? In order to answer these questions, William Quinn and John D. Turner take us on a riveting ride through the history of financial bubbles, visiting, among other places, Paris and London in 1720, Latin America in the 1820s, Melbourne in the 1880s, New York in the 1920s, Tokyo in the 1980s, Silicon Valley in the 1990s and Shanghai in the 2000s. As they do so, they help us understand why bubbles happen, and why some have catastrophic economic, social and political consequences whilst others have actually benefited society. They reveal that bubbles start when investors and speculators react to new technology or political initiatives, showing that our ability to predict future bubbles will ultimately come down to being able to predict these sparks.

Bubbleology

Bubbleology
Author: Kevin A. Hassett
Publisher: Random House Digital, Inc.
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2002
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780609609293

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There are only two types of stocks: those safe from bubbles and those that are not. This is a fact of investing many discovered as they saw their fabulous gains whittled away by the extreme calamity of the Internet sector. But what about the future? Is there a way for investors to capture the enormous potential for profit that exists at the frontier of the economy, the place where innovation and genius operate, without placing their fortunes in jeopardy? Is there a way to evaluate price increases--and declines--and identify whether they are happening for good or bad reasons? Bubbleology makes it possible to separate the winners from the losers. It is a brilliant, practical, and original analysis of the stock market that bashes the conventional wisdom about bubbles, showing that such famous examples as Tulipomania were not, in fact, bubbles at all. Bubbleology shows that the traditional way of evaluating risk--equating it with volatility--is inherently flawed and incomplete. If a stock fluctuates a lot in price it is regarded as risky. If the price is stable, then it is not. What this simplistic way of thinking leaves out is the simple fact that companies trying something completely new that may fundamentally alter the economic landscape are operating at the frontier. The stock of such a company swims in a sea of ambiguity, its circumstances uncertain, since there is little to provide guidance about the future. But when nobody knows for sure what will happen, pundits tell us again about Tulipomania, the South Seas Bubble, and now the debacle of the Internet to scare investors away from potentially enormous profits. To realize those profits, however, investors have tounderstand the role that uncertainty and ambiguity--the absence of reliable information about future events--play in the modern stock market. Those who equate ambiguity with bubbles will miss the great opportunities of the future. Bubbleology provides a new way to observe what is really going on in the market, enabling you to understand whether a stock or a sector is suspicious--whether it is in a bubble and therefore something to be avoided. Finding bubbles requires knowing where to look and what to look for. Bubbleology will help you avoid both streaming into speculative manias and shying away from perfectly good business opportunities. It tells you why you need to avoid both pontificating pundits and overconfident stock analysts. With this unique and forward-thinking book, you can inspect suspicious stocks, accurately discern risk, and diagnose a blossoming bubble before it vanishes along with your money.

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles

Speculation, Trading, and Bubbles
Author: José A. Scheinkman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2014-07-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0231537638

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As long as there have been financial markets, there have been bubbles—those moments in which asset prices inflate far beyond their intrinsic value, often with ruinous results. Yet economists are slow to agree on the underlying forces behind these events. In this book José A. Scheinkman offers new insight into the mystery of bubbles. Noting some general characteristics of bubbles—such as the rise in trading volume and the coincidence between increases in supply and bubble implosions—Scheinkman offers a model, based on differences in beliefs among investors, that explains these observations. Other top economists also offer their own thoughts on the issue: Sanford J. Grossman and Patrick Bolton expand on Scheinkman's discussion by looking at factors that contribute to bubbles—such as excessive leverage, overconfidence, mania, and panic in speculative markets—and Kenneth J. Arrow and Joseph E. Stiglitz contextualize Scheinkman's findings.

Identification of Speculative Bubbles Using State-Space Models with Markov-Switching

Identification of Speculative Bubbles Using State-Space Models with Markov-Switching
Author: Nael Al-Anaswah
Publisher:
Total Pages: 37
Release: 2009
Genre:
ISBN:

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In this paper we use a state-space model with Markov-switching to detect speculative bubbles in stock-price data. Our two innovations are (1) to adapt this technology to the state-space representation of a well-known present-value stock-price model, and (2) to estimate the model via Kalman-filtering using a plethora of artificial as well as real-world data sets that are known to contain bubble periods. Analyzing the smoothed regime probabilities, we find that our technology is well suited to detecting stock-price bubbles in both types of data sets.