Abstract
The Gömböc—a Hungarian innovation, almost as famous as the Rubik’s Cube—has only one stable and one unstable point of equilibrium. In some sense, the Gömböc was the metaphor of the Hungarian economy, which was in its unstable equilibrium in 2008, and the hope was that the financial crisis would not swing it out. However, on September 15, the Lehman had collapsed, and the Gömböc-economy swung out of its unstable equilibrium to roll over a terrible crisis period in the search for the stable equilibrium. Hungary was seriously hit by the Lehman-collapse and faced a serious liquidity crisis.
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Notes
- 1.
László Barabási-Albert was born in 1967 in a Hungarian family in Transylvania. He received his MsC in physics in Budapest in 1991 and his PhD in Boston in 1994. He published his seminal paper on the web as a scale-free network in 1999.
- 2.
The measures are well summarized in the Hungarian Spectrum (2008).
- 3.
Rajk is a Special College for talented social scientists, organizing regular university courses and various academic events. Since 1995, the democratic community of the college has awarded the annual Neumann Prize to an outstanding scholar. The award has repeatedly proved to predict the Nobel Prize, for example, in the case of Oliver Williams, Richard Thaler, Jean Tirole, and Esther Duflo.
- 4.
© Peter Bihari, member of the Monetary Council.
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Király, J. (2020). The Lehman Tsunami (September–October 2008). In: Hungary and Other Emerging EU Countries in the Financial Storm. Financial and Monetary Policy Studies, vol 49. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49544-2_5
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