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.

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.

Within the span of a week, Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke have gone from saviors to Satans.