[...] the publication in 1973 of Fischer Black and Myron Scholes's algorithm for the pricing of options.

Before Black and Scholes's work, derivatives had been a small fraction of all investments, essentially the contracts known as 'futures,' [...] Black and Scholes's algorithm allowed almost everything else to be priced the same way, including personal debt. It was what made the 'hedge fund' possible, and a world economy in which financial assets completely eclipsed the real ones that they supposedly represented. [...]