4. Hubris and Nemesis on Wall Street

It's been a rough couple of months for Wall Street's chieftains, whose fortunes have soured faster than you could say "credit crunch." Stan O'Neal was ousted from Merrill Lynch at the end of October, just a week before Chuck Prince was dethroned at Citigroup, both in response to their banks' multibillion-dollar write-downs resulting from (what else?) the subprime lending mess. Jimmy Cayne is still teetering atop Bear Sterns, but recent criticism of his ... ehem ... "hands off" management style (including a smack-down in the Wall Street Journal) makes his future as C.E.O. anything but certain.

5. Sumner Redstone's Family Feud

The Redstones are no strangers to family drama, but Sumner's high profile falling-out with his daughter Shari this July has managed to reach new levels. Shari, currently non-executive vice chair of the boards of CBS and Viacom, was once viewed by Sumner as a confidant and successor for the role of executive chairman. But now issues around corporate governance and the future of the National Amusements cinema chain have father and daughter barely speaking. An irrevocable trust currently guarantees that Sumner's roles at Viacom and CBS will fall to Shari upon his death; Sumner wants her to give up that automatic right, and threatens to oust her from both Boards if she doesn't.

6. Subprime Ratings in Every Sense

If you're looking for someone additional to blame for the sorry state of the debt market, try the ratings agencies. When subprime products turned out to be less sturdy than advertised, it came to light that Standard & Poor and Moody's, who together comprise a virtual duopoly in the bond rating game, might be operating a little too close for comfort alongside the banks underwriting debt issuance. The higher the debt ratings, the happier their clients, the more fees collected from banks; the outcome was that many bond ratings were misleadingly generous. In July, in a last-ditch effort to make amends, Moody's and S&P downgraded hundreds of mortgage bonds—too little, too late.

7. Black Mark for Privatization

The role of private contractors in Iraq became a front-page issue in September when guards from Blackwater, a private security firm, opened fire in a crowded Baghdad neighborhood as they protected a State Department convoy. Seventeen Iraqis were killed, Blackwater was blackballed in Iraq, and the F.B.I. (finally) started asking questions about how well the government is overseeing the war's corporate contractors. Answer? Not well enough.

8. Corporate Gift Giving Gone Wild

An investigation late this summer into suspicious donations to the Clinton campaign revealed that major Democratic contributer Norman Hsu was not your average political donor: Hsu had been a fugitive since 1992, when he ran after being charged with grand theft over a Ponzi scheme he created to defraud investors. Hsu was arrested in September and charged with mail fraud, wire fraud, and violating the Federal Election Campaign Act.

9. Bailing Out at E.A.D.S.

In October, French regulators announced that they had been investigating fishy sales of stock by insiders at E.A.D.S., Airbus, and Daimler (which owns E.A.D.S.) made in the spring of 2006. All parties insist that their decisions to unload millions of euros worth of E.A.D.S. stock in mid-March was merely fortuitous timing. Mais non! They had no foreknowledge of production delays on Airbus's A380—which cut the stock price for parent-company E.A.D.S. nearly in half when they were made public in June.

10. Carlyle's I.P.O. Oops

Private equity players like Carlyle Group rarely get publicly humiliated, but ohhh the schadenfreude when they do. The firm had a fair bit of egg on its face this summer when it found out the hard way that July 4 was exactly the wrong time to take public its snazzy mortgage-backed securities fund, Carlyle Capital. No sooner was the hedge fund listed in Amsterdam than the private equity firm was forced to lend $200 million of its own money in bail-outs before its reputation suffered irreparable damage. Lesson to Carlyle: In the future, stick to L.B.O.'s.