WASHINGTON (AP) -- Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said Thursday that regulators must move ahead on ways to prevent a future financial crisis from occurring even as they battle one that threatens to plunge the country into recession.

"We do not have the luxury of waiting for markets to stabilize before we think about the future," Bernanke said in a speech in Richmond.

Last month Bernanke, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and other top economic policymakers called for stricter regulation of mortgage lenders as part of a broad effort to prevent a repeat of the credit and financial problems that have damaged the economy.

The recommendations from the presidential advisory group on financial markets cover mortgage lenders and other institutions as well as investors, credit ratings agencies and regulators.

Federal and state regulators should strengthen oversight of mortgage lenders, the presidential group proposed last month. Also, states should follow strong, uniform licensing standards for mortgage brokers. Legislation in Congress would create a nationwide licensing system.

Those recommendations were put forward after spreading problems in the housing and credit markets threatened to paralyze the entire financial system, which could devastate the national economy.

"Many of the necessary changes that have been identified, including increasing transparency, improving

Want to be sure you won't run out of money in retirement? The standard advice that you'll hear from planners (or find on the pages of Money Magazine) is to follow the 4% rule: Withdraw no more than 4% of your portfolio the first year of retirement and then increase that amount for inflation each year. And indeed, if you do this, there will be roughly a 90% chance that your money will last at least 30 years.

But while this rule is a decent guideline for managing your withdrawals, it can't cover all of the surprises that life - and the markets - may have in store for you. Before you adopt this regimen, consider these two rarely discussed risks.

First, if your investments lose money or post subpar gains early in your retirement, those reassuring 90% odds shrink.

Earn less than 2% a year on average in the first five years, for example, and the odds of your money lasting three decades or longer fall to 57%, according to T. Rowe Price. The combination of withdrawals and lousy performance so depletes your portfolio that you can't make it up when the market rebounds.

Earning stellar gains early on doesn't guarantee that your money will last, but it helps. This brings us to another risk: If the markets are kind to you, a good chance exists that your money not only will be there well into your dotage but will grow to more than you had at the beginning. Apply the 4% rule to a