Kioloa08-Financial meltdown working group

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Mind Games at Kioloa 2008

Contents

Introduction

Research Questions for Kioloa

Are there aspects of what was going on in the lead up to the current crisis that could have been more readily identified as a problem had policy-makers looked at the world from a CSS perspective?

Do we have anything to say about the appropriate balance between market failure risk and government failure risk as the pendulum shifts back towards a more pro-regulatory stance? Perhaps along the lines of government evolving at a slow evolutionary pace (or punctuated equilibria?) and private sector adapting very quickly?

How should policy makers consider risk from the interaction of behaviours/decisions when it isn't linearly related to the individual effects of those behaviours/decisions?

Background

Reading

(please add refs/links as you think-of/find them)

Directly related to the financial meltdown

There is a great podcast/blog produced in the States by some financial reporters that offer daily updates on the financial situation there as well as in-depth explanations for lay people of all of the terms that get thrown around. Link

By the same group are two hour-long programs that also explain the way this crisis has cascaded. (With an emphasis on the US aspects of the problem, but you get a sense of the global ripples.) Both the sub-prime mortgage crisis trigger and the resulting global meltdown.

The End of Wall Street

Paul Krugman's Blog

Subprime Primer The Subprime Primer is a slide presentation that uses stick figures to explain the present economic meltdown.

Relevant science

A great article on modeling philosophy that is worth keeping in mind: Steve Bankes (1993). Exploratory Modeling for Policy Analysis. Operations Research 41(3): 435-449.

Complexity in the financial system

Essay in Nature 30 October 2008 on the need for a scientific revolution in economics:

Paper by Bob May on 'Ecology for Bankers'