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Speculative Bubbles and Crashes I: Irrational

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Abstract

The most dramatic and compelling of all economic discontinuities have been the crashes of great speculative bubbles. The most extreme of these have triggered immense political and social transformations. In the United States, the stock market crash of 1929 serves as a cataclysmic divide between one world and another. Even today, the remote echoes of the crash of the Mississippi bubble in 1720 reverberate in the hankering after gold standards and fixed exchange rates by France in international financial negotiations. Thus it is not surprising that the first application of catastrophe theory to economics was a model of stock market crashes developed by Zeeman (1974).

Impovernment of the booble by the bauble for the bubble.” James Joyce, 1939 Finnegan’s Wake, p. 273

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© 1991 Kluwer Academic Publishers

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Rosser, J.B. (1991). Speculative Bubbles and Crashes I: Irrational. In: From Catastrophe to Chaos: A General Theory of Economic Discontinuities. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3796-6_4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-3796-6_4

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA

  • Print ISBN: 978-1-4613-3798-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4613-3796-6

  • eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive

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