physics

The current financial crisis is often described in terms evocative of Poseidon's wrath: a wave of foreclosures, a perfect storm of market conditions, a tsunami of debt. It turns out those descriptions may be more accurate, and more useful, than other metaphors. If financial markets behave less like the stochastic, Brownian systems they are often compared to and more like nonlinear wave systems, then rogue waves can account for spikes and plunges in financial markets.