A multidisciplinary research coordinated by Jorge Pacheco, a researcher at the Centre for Molecular and Environmental Biology (CBMA), was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science, comparing financial networks with 500 years of difference, following the cash flow (Structural and temporal patterns of the first global trading market).
Researchers in History, Physics and Computational Science looked at thousands of documents by Simón Ruiz, a 16th-century businessman, and made a quantitative comparison between the sixteenth century and the current financial market, noting striking similarities between these two networks transactions.
The comparison between these two periods allows concluding that the main features of what was the first global transaction market remained robust and unchanged through time. The text also suggests the existence of transaction patterns that remain unchanged over time.
In the period of time to which the work is reported, rapid adaptations of the network were evidenced in response to the geopolitical agitation of that time, indicating that there are ways to face current financial crises, since they resemble those of the 16th-century.
For more information: http://rsos.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/5/8/180577
R. Soc. open sci. 2018 5 180577; DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180577. Published 22 August 2018
