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.

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.

The daily headlines are alarming: homeowners are falling behind on mortgage payments at an increasing rate; foreclosures are up steeply. Has the situation ever been this bad before? Well yes, said Jay Brinkmann, chief economist of the Mortgage Bankers Association.

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.

The collapse of the subprime residential real estate market last summer has Wall Street investment banks and international financial titans reeling.

Knowledge@W. P. Carey recently taped a discussion about the subprime market between Jeffrey Coles, chairman of the finance department at the W. P. Carey School of Business, Anthony Sanders, professor of real estate and finance at the school and Steven Davidson, vice president,