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.

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.

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

During the financial crisis and the resulting recession, companies set tough targets for their CFOs, refusing, in some cases, to give bonuses unless companies reported positive earnings, accounting professor Michal Matejka says.

More American companies, especially start-ups and those in the technology industry, are offering broad-based employee stock options as part of their compensation packages.

For more than a year, the European Union has been in crisis over the huge debts faced by its weakest economies. Cutbacks in social programs and benefits have stirred unrest in those countries, as well as in better-off nations in the Eurozone.