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How has Carlson achieved gender balance? A big part of the answer is Marilyn Carlson. She created a culture of meritocracy, where talent drives development and promotions. And surprise, surprise. When women are given an equal chance and the same preparatory experiences, they rise in equal numbers.

General Growth Properties , the nation's No. 2 shopping mall company, may soon become the next giant felled by the credit crunch. Analysts believe that Chief Executive John Bucksbaum, who put the 54-year-old outfit deep into hock as he bought up retailing real estate across the country, could be forced to sell the company and its more than 200 malls nationwide because he'll be unable to make payments on its staggering $27.4 billion debt load. "GGP is at the end as a going concern," says RBC Capital Markets analyst Richard C. Moore II. "It's time for them to go away."

With the House of Representatives' Oct. 3 passage of the Treasury's $700 billion plan to stabilize the financial markets by buying up troubled mortgage-related assets, you could almost hear the sigh of relief spreading throughout Washington and Wall Street. After two weeks of nearly nonstop negotiations in which the bill repeatedly appeared to flounder, it was quickly passed on to President George W. Bush, who signed it into law within hours.

The new 2009 model cars and trucks have been trickling into dealerships for months. But now that the pumpkins are ripe and showing up in stores, the leaves are turning, and off-weeks in the NFL season have begun, the newest models will really start rolling.

Any efforts to curtail the flow of counterfeit parts into U.S. military planes, ships, and missiles will be hampered by the Pentagon's poor vetting of suppliers and contracting rules that allow questionable companies to continue selling to the Pentagon. The checkered history of one supplier illustrates the problem.

The Pentagon's zeal to buy microchips on the cheap gives an advantage to sometimes questionable parts brokers that compete with more established suppliers. The dealings of AA Dynamic Enterprises of Anaheim, Calif., show how this works.

The American military faces a growing threat of potentially fatal equipment failure -- and even foreign espionage -- because of counterfeit computer components used in warplanes, ships, and communication networks. Fake microchips flow from unruly bazaars in rural China to dubious kitchen-table brokers in the U.S. and into complex weapons. Senior Pentagon officials publicly play down the danger, but government documents, as well as interviews with insiders, suggest possible connections between phony parts and breakdowns.

On Thursday night, Oct. 2, all eyes were on the Vice-Presidential debate. Friday, however, they will turn again to the House of Representatives, as it holds a do-over of its dramatic Monday vote. Will the House this time deliver the financial-system bailout that the Administration and business groups are demanding, and which the Senate passed Wednesday night?

The prosecution of an American company called Syren Technology offers a tantalizing hint of the espionage threat posed by fake Chinese computer parts. But so far neither U.S. law enforcement nor industry has publicly produced evidence of this kind of high-tech spying.

Barry Tipping spent three days searching for gas in Atlanta. The quest seemed to be in vain, as the 44-year-old tried nearly 20 gas stations, many with their pumps draped in bags, or waits that stretched to more than an hour. Twice when Tipping did find stations with gas, he sat in a long line only to see the station run out of premium unleaded before he reached the pump. So here was Tipping on Sept. 30 happily paying $4.33 a gallon to fill his silver Mercedes at an Exxon station in the northern part of the city, a sense of relief on his face. ...

In Las Vegas these days, even billionaires are getting their credit checked. On Sept. 30 Las Vegas Sands founder Sheldon Adelson announced that he would ante up $475 million from his personal fortune to buy preferred stock in the company, which will pay 6.5% interest over five years. Adelson's notes will convert at $49.65 per share, a considerable climb from the $31 at which they currently trade. The move shored up Las Vegas Sands' balance sheet. ...

U.S. banks large and small are buckling under the pressure of the credit crisis. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has seized 13 institutions this year, most recently Washington Mutual. The regulator, which maintains a list of "problem" banks, doesn't disclose which others raise red flags. But one measure, the so-called Texas Ratio, may offer a clue.

The financial crisis has touched off worries among entrepreneurs about the status of their business loans and credit lines (BusinessWeek.com, 9/26/08). Will they have trouble rolling over their credit lines? Will new credit be available for small companies looking to fund operations? Smart Answers columnist Karen E. Klein posed some basic questions to two experts about this issue: Alex Grinewicz, executive vice-president for lending at Columbia Bank in Fair Lawn, N.J., and Nick Florio, an accountant and senior partner at accounting firm Citrin Cooperman in New York City. ...

Critics have faulted European governments for not doing enough to ease the worsening financial and economic crisis in their own backyard, but officials have moved with lightning speed this week.

When you build a wall, you need to start with the bricks on the bottom. In the same way, when fighting a financial crisis, the government needs to start with the basics: reassuring bank depositors that their money is safe.

There's nothing quite like a crisis to draw investigators looking for criminal action.

With the financial system bailout plan derailed by the House of Representatives on Sept. 29, the resulting plunge in equities made headlines around the world. But while the stocks gyrate, it's important to keep one thing in mind: The big problem for financial markets is still the credit crunch. So as bad as equities have looked -- and during the big Sept. 29 sell-off, they looked pretty bad -- the true indicators investors should be watching are obscure measures such as credit default swaps, TED spreads, and commercial paper volume (all explained below).

During the mid-1990s, Wachovia's merger-mad chief executive, Ed Crutchfield, once famously joked that the key to persuading another bank to sell to him was to simply stack "$1 billion bills" on the table until the target relented. Now, though, it's Wachovia that is being taken over, and its buyer, Citigroup , got Wachovia's core banking franchise for a mere buck a share, as the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. gave Citi the rights to Wachovia's banking operations just for agreeing to assume a portion of any losses from its loan portfolio.

A failed rescue of foundering financial institutions (BusinessWeek.com, 9/29/08) could hit consumers where it hurts, making it harder for individuals to refinance mortgages and secure new-car loans, among other things.

From a report released Sept. 22 by Standard & Poor's Market, Credit and Risk Strategies

Billionaire Eli Broad was at the Clinton Global Initiative annual meeting in New York on Sept. 25 to announce the creation of an educational research laboratory at Harvard, yet another large gift from the philanthropist. BusinessWeek reporter Lawrence Delevingne spoke with Broad, who made his fortune in real estate and insurance, largely through holdings in American International Group , about the $700 billion Wall Street bailout and where he sees the economy heading. Here is an edited version of the conversation:

Thursday was a day in Washington that would have tried the patience of Monty Hall. After an early-afternoon announcement that lawmakers had achieved the broad outlines of an agreement to rescue the financial markets with up to $700 billion of government investment, a flurry of political jockeying threatened to scuttle hopes of a deal. A high-profile meeting of congressional leaders and Presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama, seemed to yield little more than recriminations. ...

At first the loss of power after Hurricane Ike was kind of novel, says Terry Weir, an immigration attorney who lives in Houston. "I was hanging out in the courtyard with neighbors, drinking wine by candlelight and having grand barbecue gatherings to cook all the meat thawing from the freezer," she says. At Day 10, however, Weir began to lose her cool.

How many former Lehman Brothers bankers or AIG executives are likely to be buying a Park Avenue apartment or a home in Darien, Conn., this year? Most likely answer: not many at all.

Stuttgart - With a price tag topping $100,000, the new Mercedes-Benz S-Class hybrid isn't aimed at folks who can't afford $4-a-gallon gas. Rather, the car is the first in a series of new German models that let well-heeled customers appear green without giving up land-yacht amenities such as twin-powered sunroofs, vast leather seats, and a top speed of 150 miles per hour. "If we want to preserve the American way of driving, there's no alternative," says Klaus Meier, director of sales and marketing for Mercedes.

Allentown, Pa., is in some ways a profoundly ordinary place. Like cities and towns all over America, it has been shaken by economic changes seemingly beyond its control: the churning of industries, the dislocation of workers. Many residents just sigh at the mention of Billy Joel's anthem to the gritty, struggling Allentown of the 1980s, when the once-great Bethlehem Steel mill went into a death spiral: "Every child had a pretty good shot to get at least as far as their old man got. But something happened on the way to that place."

With public sentiment casting the Bush Administration's plan to resolve the financial crisis as a bailout for the firms that caused it, Senate Banking Committee members took turns grilling Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve Board Chairman Ben Bernanke at a hearing on Sept. 23. Behind the scenes, however, many expected nuts-and-bolts negotiation to yield a compromise bill, perhaps over the weekend if not by Friday's scheduled adjournment. ...

Soho was once one. So were Tribeca; Venice, Calif.; and Philadelphia's Old City. These former gritty neighborhoods once offered low-cost housing for artists.