Computational Finance as a Driver of Economics [Developmental tools]

The global economy is in worse shape. The credit crisis has spurred historic declines in property values, financial instruments that until recently traded freely have become illiquid, arresting the flow of assets; commodity prices gyrate wildly. We measure economic health by reading a wide range of indicators, from the growth rate of countries´ GNPs to the volatility of multiple financial markets. And then there are the balance sheets of the world´s banks. Finance is the cornerstone for the smooth functioning of the global economy. Unaware of the impact of their decisions, investors and traders large and small determine the relative prices of currencies, the level of interest rates, and stock prices. To develop predictive services that are reliable and add genuine value, we have to model not only the behavior of traders and their interactions but how trading activity relates to society in general. To create such robust models we need an event-based programming language. Olsen Routes software has been designed to enable the modeling of complex networks of interaction.