I have written about many crises as a business and financial journalist over two decades. I was a general editor at Asiaweek magazine, a Time Warner publication, when Japan’s asset bubble burst in 1990 and ushered in a Lost Decade of economic stagnation. I was business editor when Asia was rocked by the 1997 financial crisis.

I followed the implosion of the dotcom bubble at the turn of the century, the fall of stock markets after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, and the economic and business fallout of the 2003 SARS outbreak on Hong Kong. 
 
But all these events pale in comparison with the current turmoil, which I had been covering as contributing editor at CFO Asia magazine – until this Economist Group publication fell victim to the crisis in February. Across both the developed and developing worlds, the economic and business losses from this global recession are proving to be far more severe than anything else the world has seen since the Great Depression in the 1930s.  
 
This is not news to Asia’s finance executives, who are at the forefront of the crisis. “We’ve gone through the 1997 financial crisis, SARS and all that, but this is extraordinary,” S. Venkateswaran, group finance director of fashion designer and manufacturer Mulitex Group in Hong Kong, told me in an interview in March. “We export to various places, so if one market is having an issue, other markets compensate for that. But now no market is an exception. Every market is getting hit.”
 
Asia has been hit hardest because many of its companies are exporters like Mulitex. “The intensity of the downswing [in Asia] has outstripped what could have been anticipated based on the historical correlation between business cycles in the G-2 (the euro area and the United States) and Asia,” the International Monetary Fund noted in a recent report. “Indeed, the downswing has been even larger than in other regions, and sharper than at the epicenter of the global crisis.”
 
Excluding China and India, Asia’s GDP fell by close to 15% in the fourth quarter of 2008, versus a contraction of 6.25% in the global economy as a whole.
 
Much is expected of CFOs, finance directors, controllers, treasurers and other finance executives. In a survey sponsored by ACCA, the global association of chartered certified accountants, 83% of more than 450 senior executives surveyed around the world say that the finance chief’s role has clearly become more important today than a year ago.
 
Three-quarters agree that the board, management and rank-and-file now perceive the CFO’s contribution to the business as more valuable than they did in the past.
 
“It’s not just cash management that is taking up more of the CFO’s time,” says the report. “The majority of respondents say that in the past year, the CFO has adopted a more hands-on role in areas such as staffing numbers and workloads, overhead cost-reduction initiatives, remuneration and bonus schemes, as well as capital expenditure decisions, credit control, banking relationships and risk identification and management.”
 

More than two-thirds also observe that the CFO is now more involved in establishing medium- and long-term corporate strategy.