But I do not forget that a very early attempt to import the phase transition notion into social science resulted in Friederick Engels’ famous “law of the transformation of quantity into quality”, described in his (circa 1883) work Dialectics of Nature, which provides some insight into early attempts to grapple with concepts now considered reasonably well understood.
BIS Review 165/2009  9  is very close to what every other trader pays for the same asset at the same time. In early October 2008 the market could simply not find a value for many of those securities that had been so highly priced only few weeks before.