I worked in high finance '87-'91 as a mathematician/analyst/programmer. Already by then it was widely known in the financial community that it was far superior to use distributions (of interest rates and volatility) estimated from actual data, rather than presuming they conformed to some specific parametric family of distributions, as does the original version of Black-Scholes. In those days, doing this right was extremely compute-intensive. But in this millennium it would be a piece of cake. So it's hard for me to believe that Black-Scholes is responsible for the recent recession/depression. My guess is that the repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 introduced market instability that played a large role. --Dan ________________________________________________________________________________________ It goes without saying that .