FRS Lecture: Diagnostics of Global Financial Market

Event Date: 10 Feb 2016 04:00 AM - 10 Feb 2016 05:00 AM

Event Venue: Value Lab Asia, Singapore-ETH Centre, CREATE Lvl 6

FRS Lecture: Diagnostics of Global Financial Markets and Economies: What does it bode for the Future?
by Prof Didier Sornette

The late 1970s to beginning 1980s was an epoch when transitions occurred, unnoticed by all. This transition corresponds to a change from a productivity-fuelled growth in the 1950s and 1960s to what Prof Didier Sornette refers to as the regime of the “illusion of the perpetual money machine”. In this lecture, Prof Sornette will present a massive amount of evidence of this transition in all sectors of public and private life and share how to get out of this catch 22 situation.

He will share strong evidence that, since the early 1980s, consumption has been increasingly funded by smaller savings, booming financial profits, wealth extracted from house price appreciation and explosive debt.  He will describe the transition, in gestation in the 1970s, which started at full speed in the early 1980s and developed until 2008. This regime was further supported by a climate of deregulation and massive growth in financial derivatives designed to spread and diversify risks globally.

The speaker
Prof Didier Sornette is a Professor on the Chair of Entrepreneurial Risks at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich). He is also a professor of the Swiss Finance Institute, a professor associated with both the department of Physics and the department of Earth Sciences at ETH Zurich. He was previously jointly a Professor of Geophysics at UCLA, Los Angeles California and a Research Director on the theory and prediction of complex systems at the French National Centre for Scientific Research.

FRS lectures are open to all.Please register here.