Most major U.S. companies have an ethics officer, but as investors survey the wreckage of a deepening financial crisis that has exposed behavior ranging from risky to downright illegal, one might ask “What were they doing?”

From Bernard Madoff’s alleged $50 billion Ponzi scheme, to the subprime mortgage crisis, to lavish spending on the chief executive’s office at Merrill Lynch, the past year has seen a crisis of confidence in business that cost investors $6.9 trillion in U.S. stock market value last year.
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