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.

The heady rush of taking real estate investment trusts from public to private has evaporated in today's credit-market crunch. And so, it's time to face a new reality, says New York attorney Robin Panovka, a renowned expert on REIT mergers and acquisitions.

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.

The recession has caused all sorts of difficulties for CFOs: falling earnings, tumbling stock prices and, occasionally, knotty negotiations with lenders. For most of them, it has also brought tougher targets for earning their bonuses.

Finance scholars have long urged corporate managers to hold less cash and assume more debt. Too much cash, the argument went, could make executives lax, encouraging imprudent acquisitions and spendthrift expansions.

While the world's economy has been ailing for almost two years, signs are beginning to point to recovery.