  We reformulate the Cont-Bouchaud model of financial markets in terms of
classical "super-spins" where the spin value is a measure of the number of
individual traders represented by a portfolio manager of an investment agency.
We then extend this simplified model by switching on interactions among the
super-spins to model the tendency of agencies getting influenced by the opinion
of other managers. We also introduce a fictitious temperature (to model other
random influences), and time-dependent local fields to model slowly changing
optimistic or pessimistic bias of traders. We point out close similarities
between the price variations in our model with $N$ super-spins and total
displacements in an $N$-step Levy flight. We demonstrate the phenomena of
natural and artificially created bubbles and subsequent crashes as well as the
occurrence of "fat tails" in the distributions of stock price variations.
