With the nation’s financial system teetering (蹒跚) on a cliff, the compensation arrangements for executives of the big banks and other financial firms are coming under close examination again. Bankers’ excessive risk-taking is a significant cause of this financial crisis and has contributed to others in the past. In this case, it was fueled by low interest rates and kept going by a false sense of security created by a debt-fueled bubble in the economy. Mortgage lenders gladly lent enormous sums to those who could not afford to pay them back, dividing the loans and selling them off to the next financial institution along the chain, which took advantage of the same high-tech securitization (证券化) to load on more risky mortgage-based assets. Financial regulation will have to catch up with the most irresponsible practices that led banks down this road, in hopes of averting the next crisis, which is likely to involve different financial techniques and different sorts of assets. But it is worth examining the root problem of compensation schemes that are tied to short-term profits and revenue’s, and thus encourage bankers to take irresponsible levels of risk.