Metastable States – the Meltdown Precursors I’ve just read a recent column by JL, one of the editors from Taipan Daily. He states, in his column “There Will Be Blood in Europe”: Stepping back a bit: What is so frightening right now, not just in Europe but China and America and Japan too, is the presence of fraud-fueled “Lehman 2.0” catalysts threatening to explode. One could say that the 2008 financial crisis was the mother of all wake-up calls. But…
“What is X?” – Modeling the 2008-2009 Financial Systems Meltdown We’re about to start a detailed walkthrough of applying a “simple” statistical thermodynamic model to the Wall Street players in the 2007-2009 timeframe. The two kinds of information that I’ll be joining together for this will be a description of Wall Street dynamics, based largely on Chasing Goldman Sachs (see previous blogposts for link), and the two-state Ising thermodynamic model that I’ve been presenting over the past several posts. The…
The Origin of Wealth – and Phase Transitions in Complex, Nonlinear Systems Once again, after a nearly two-year hiatus (off by only a week from my first posting on this in May of 2010), I’m getting back to one of my great passions in life – emergent behavior in complex, adaptive systems. And I’m once again starting a discussion/blog-theme referencing Eric Beinhocker’s work, The Origin of Wealth. Since this book was originally published (in 2006), we’ve seen an ongoing series…
Phase Spaces: Mapping Complex Systems I’ve spent the day on cloud computing. Yes, there will be a course on it at GMU this Fall of 2010. And cloud computing is simply a technology; a means of getting stuff done. In and of itself, I think there are more exciting things in the world — such as phase spaces. One of the classic nonlinear systems is the Ising spin glass model. This system is composed of only two kind of particles;…
Using this blog as an online set of research notes (about that which I don’t mind sharing ) — suppose that we try using an equilibrium-based approach of some sort for modeling what we all know is a very non-equilibrium world. Which formulation, Helmholtz or Gibbs, works best for us? Helmholtz free energy is at constant temperature and volume. It is denoted as A, where the defining equation is A = U-TS, where U is enthalpy, T is temperature, and…
Continuing with Beinhocker’s Origin of Wealth, it is important to distinguish carefully between some of the ideas that Beinhocker is expounding. While overall, he is doing a good job of bringing in many related thoughts and ideas, there is a slight tendency towards “mushing.” In that note, I’d like to suggest that we discern carefully between ideas involving utility (Origins, hardcover; pp. 34 & 37), and equilibrium. On pg. 34, Beinhocker begins a discussion of how utility is an underlying…
Over the last few months, questions of not only wealth and finances, but the underpinnings of our entire financial structure, have become paramount in many of our minds. We — that usually means you and me — and right now means the world collectively — have largely misunderstood the world’s financial structure over recent years. (Those who HAVE accurately understood are not only more secure, but substantially richer by now.) Most of us are current on “what went wrong.” Most…