Rio Osumi, director of Japan treasury for Intel Corp., was working on a presentation at 2:46 p.m. on Friday, March 11, when the room started to shake. She dove under her desk. The 46-year-old Tokyo native wasn't panicked. The take-cover move she had been taught in grade school was a reflex. But Osumi knew this was different. "It was shaking violently, up and down," she recalls. "Usually it shakes horizontally. I knew this was a bad one." Once again the orderly world of treasury and risk management plunged into crisis as the world's third largest economy suffered an unprecedented disaster.

Multinational treasury staffs deployed quickly to shore up liquidity, cover currency exposures, investigate supply chain damage and react to risks that were hard to predict.

But right after the quake, back in Osumi's office, pictures fell from the walls, cabinet doors flew open and paper file folders plopped onto the floor. A few seconds later, it was suddenly very quiet.