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.

The ASU Repeat Sales Index (ASU-RSI) continued to decline in June, but the numbers contained positive signals that improvement is the trend in the Phoenix metro real estate market.

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.