sjk: As a former CFO, I am a pretty decent hand with MS Excel, and have programmed with Visual Basic for Excel. I have seen some of these financial modeling spreadsheets that quant guys have put together and they are simply amazing. They blow anything I am capable of doing with that program clean out of the water.
The one thing every one of these models share is this, however: They have never been tested in the real world. All of the assumptions are exactly that: Assumptions.
What everyone who assesses risk right now is extremely nervous about is what happens when the real world intrudes on the assumptions. The general consensus is that, like LTCM back in 1998, it ain’t gonna be pretty.