Book Reviews

Maria Stella Chiaruttini of Department of Economic and Social History University of Vienna of reviews “Boom and Bust: A Global History of Financial Bubbles” by William Branch and John D. Turner. The Econlit abstract of this book begins: “Explores the history of financial bubbles, proposing a new metaphor and analytical framework that describes their causes, explains what determines their consequences, and may help predict them in the future.”

Research on multiple bubbles in China’s multi-level stock market

Financial bubbles have always been a topic of long-term concern for economists. Understanding bubble phenomenon and dating the period of bubbles in real time can provide an early warning diagnosis for financial bubbles and help regulatory authorities to control it and maintain market order. The generalized sup ADF (GSADF) and backward sup ADF (BSADF) tests with flexible window width can effectively detect and date periodically collapsing bubbles in real time. Based on the financial present value model, this paper applies right-tail recursive ADF test to test multiple bubbles in China’s multi-level stock market. Unlike the other researches in China, the ratios of the real stock prices’ natural logarithm to the real dividends’ natural logarithm are used for our testing instead of stock price index. Empirical results show that there are 8 bubbles in the Main-Board Market, 6 bubbles in the Small and Medium Enterprises Board (SMEs), and 4 bubbles in the Growth Enterprise Market (GEM). These bubbles are liquidity-driven and presuppose a loose credit cycle, with the exception of bubbles in 2014–2015. The frequent emergence of bubbles in a short time indicates that China’s stock market is still emerging market. In addition, frequent fluctuations imply there is a serious “herd effect” and a lack of monitoring mechanism for bubble risk. This study not only enrich the real-time dynamic research on periodical bubbles of China’s stock market, but also provide an empirical reference for investors’ investment choices, financial decisions of listed companies and warning mechanism of regulatory authorities.

Diagnosis and Prediction of IIGPS’ Countries Bubble Crashes during BREXIT

We herein employ an alternative approach to model the financial bubbles prior to crashes and fit a log-periodic power law (LPPL) to IIGPS countries (Italy, Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain) during Brexit. These countries represent the five financially troubled economies of the Eurozone that have suffered the most during the Brexit referendum. It was found that all 77 crashes across the five IIGPS nations from 19 January 2015 until 17 February 2020 strictly followed a log-periodic power law or other LPPL signature. They all had a speculative bubble phase (following the power law growth) that was then followed by a sudden crash immediately after reaching a critical point. Furthermore, their pattern coefficients were similar as well. This study would surely assist policymakers around the Eurozone to predict future crashes with the help of these parameters.

The Trouble with Minding Markets: Emotional Finance in Context

The term ‘Emotional Finance’ normally denotes a methodological approach advocated by Richard Taffler and David Tuckett, which they intended as a challenge both to Behavioral Finance and to mainstream finance and economics. In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, Emotional Finance received a warm reception from regulators, the financial press, and the CFA Institute. Nearly a decade on, their ideas have largely failed to achieve traction in the academic literature, and continue to struggle to find empirical validation. Their approach is essentially an application of Kleinian psychoanalysis to financial markets, albeit without the terminological rigor that psychoanalytic practitioners might expect. Because their approach is inherently interdisciplinary, it has rarely been subject to scrutiny, as few psychoanalytic commentators feel qualified to comment on financial markets, and fewer finance academics feel comfortable commenting on the psychoanalytic theory. This chapter characterizes the main theoretical claims of Emotional Finance, and subjects each of them to scrutiny, finding them largely untenable. Although financial bubbles are commonplace and emotional responses to markets unremarkable, the subsidiary arguments advanced by advocates of Emotional Finance to support their primary claims are found wanting. The interpretative strategy of Emotional Finance is fundamentally flawed. Although it is fruitful to analyze the role of emotions in financial markets, more precise, rigorous and realistic approaches to these problems are needed.