Bernie Madoff. AIG. Allen Stanford. When Marianne Jennings talks to her undergraduate students about business ethics these days, those are the subjects they want to talk about.

The Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) recently came out with new rules governing "mark-to-market accounting." Entities employing mark-to-market adjust the value of financial assets up or down, according to fair market value.

Hope Berman Levin, the regional president for U.S. Bank in Arizona, recently touched on some of the rapid-fire changes that are happening in banking, during a talk at the W. P. Carey School's 26th Annual  Dean's Council of 100 Executive of the Year Luncheon.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner announced the Obama administration's plan to rescue financial markets yesterday. The plan was long on promise and short on details, however, which sent markets spinning.

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.

Warren Buffet said: "When the economic tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked." The financial upheaval of the last two years has revealed a number of inadequately clad investors.

John C. Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Mutual Fund Group and President of its Bogle Financial Markets Research Center, has been warning us for decades about the danger of short-term thinking and greed as motivator in the U.S. financial sector.

The deepest recession since World War II was caused by the collapse of the financial sector, but that disintegration is not proof that markets don't work, said Stanford economist Edward Lazear, who was chief economic advisor to former President George W. Bush.

To sum up where the real estate finance markets are today, Kieran Quinn, chairman and CEO of Column Financial, Credit Suisse's Atlanta-based mortgage lending subsidiary for commercial properties, relied on a poetic quote from an associate: "Things will be fine in 2009." Quinn was speaking at the