There are many myths about modern economies, which can also be considered as stylized facts of capitalism. I will consider three in particular:

1. More liquidity is better.

2. Financial markets are efficient.

3. Economics is an equilibrium system.

I have observed that we have two ways of rejecting myths or stylized facts. One is a criticism of traditional economics, and the other is a criticism in terms of traditional economics, for example referring to the meaning of the financial matching mechanism (see, for example, Helbing’s 2013a,b,c; Helbing and Kirman 2013).

Fig. 1.5 Decomposition of net foreign assets. 1980-2007 (USD billion). Extracted from Chart 1 of Habib (2010, p. 15)

1.8.1