The pain of the newly-declared recession knows no boundaries, and the Asian economies are not immune, but that region is positioned to rebound faster than the U.S. and come out stronger than before, according to Tom McCabe, managing director of Standard Chartered Bank PLC.

If the federal government really wants to stem the financial crisis, it must decisively address the huge — and still growing — number of delinquent and soon-to-be-delinquent mortgages, according to finance and real estate Professor Anthony Sanders.

In the last month, financial markets came as close to collapsing as they have since the Great Depression, and the root of their woes was frozen credit markets. The crisis sparked several weeks of furious and futile improvisation by U.S. regulators and lawmakers.

It's said the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and some people sweating through the credit-market meltdown might agree. Underlying the wreckage are decades of regulatory and legislative decisions that opened the door to today's financial woes.

It's been called a crisis of confidence. It started with bad real estate loans and highly leveraged bets on those loans. Now it has frozen credit markets. Banks aren't lending to each other. Businesses can't get the short-term loans they need to finance day-to-day operations.

Within the span of a week, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have gone from saviors to Satans.

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission is moving to replace existing rules-based accounting standards with principles-based, international ones in filing requirements.

President Bush has signed into law a housing package passed by Congress last week that authorizes the Treasury Department to spend federal funds to rescue Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac if necessary.

A geographic mapping of subprime and Alt-A loans in the Phoenix metropolitan area has revealed some unexpected results: these risky mortgages are not scattered, but cluster in certain cities and neighborhoods.

A firm going public relies on the capital raised in its initial public offering to grow and thrive, but studies have found that IPOs in the United States are underpriced an average of 15 percent.