Risky Business.

It's hard to watch the congressional financial commission hearings, especially the testimony of former Washington Mutual executives yesterday. What's clear is that the risk management function was marginalized, and that executives went ahead and did exactly what they thought would drive the greatest profits.

Many of us who worked at WaMu thought that mis-deeds by folks in the home loans group were cause for termination. We were reminded fairly often of the ethical code of conduct that was supposed to drive the company.

Things were not as they seemed.

The challenge now is to create guard rails so that this sort of thing cannot happen without a spotlight being shined upon it.