Johnson, for one, believes that for many Wall Streeters, that stigma will be unfair. “Many people were doing everything they thought worked to be aware and avoid a problem of this magnitude—they certainly didn’t set out to blow up their firms—but they didn’t realize how big the problem was. These were extraordinary, out-of-the-blue, once-in-a-lifetime events; people went out on the ice thinking it was probably two feet thick, feeling comfortable that it couldn’t be any less than six inches thick, and found out it was half an inch thick and couldn’t take their weight.”

John Costas, the former CEO of UBS’s investment bank, helped transform UBS into a major force with the help of top bankers like Ken Moelis. Now Moelis is running his own boutique bank, while Costas launched his own market-making firm this summer. Two years ago, he left UBS after Dillon Reed Capital Management—the in-house hedge fund he had been asked to run—incurred losses on mortgage securities. In the months that followed, Costas contemplated positions on offer at a number of Wall Street firms, but found that most them were interested only in the events of his final month on the job. “I had spent 26 years and four months on Wall Street, and made profits for my firm in all but one month. But I spent four hours talking to one board of directors about that one month.”

Costas points out that virtually every investor who was active in the market ended up being hit by losses to some extent, and he says he’s learned from that experience. “Clearly, mistakes were made by everyone, especially when it came to (understanding) systemic risk across the market.” Opening his own firm, PrinceRidge Group LLC, meant that Costas wouldn’t have to keep explaining the events of 2007 over and over again—he could just get on with the job of making markets in the fixed-income and stock markets. That decision makes Costas the owner of his own firm and the architect of his own fate, like Cruz. But it also means that none of the beleaguered Wall Street giants have access to Costas's quarter-century of experience and his impressive Rolodex.

To get out of the mess, Wall Street needs its best and brightest. It needs a way to differentiate between those bankers who are truly culpable—who contributed directly to the insanity—and the rest, the majority who realized too late what was happening, trusted too much in risk management models, or who committed other errors of omission.

Even before the Great Horror of 2008, investment bankers had been worrying about a gap in the talent pool caused by the last meltdown, the dotcom crash, and the accounting scandals at companies like Enron and Worldcom. Making Wall Street an even more difficult place to work than it already is could end up leaving us with a financial system that isn’t able to attract or retain the most intelligent, thoughtful, and creative minds—those most likely not only to steer their institutions back from the brink today and help them avoid repeating the experience in the future.

Just ask “Mark,” a mid-career banker who, as one of the most skilled advisory bankers at his level, had a lot of offers early this year after his former firm decided to dispense with his services as part of a large-scale RIF “I had banking opportunities offered at bulge bracket firms and at smaller shops and boutiques, but frankly, the guys I talked to there were just hanging on by their fingernails—it was an atmosphere of fear,” says Mark, who prefers to stay anonymous for fear of losing his new job at a buyout firm. “I know I could stay on Wall Street and contribute, but why? I took that job to create wealth for myself, not out of sheer love for it. So why would I work for the love of it alone today?” It doesn’t hurt, he adds dryly, that describing himself as a “banker” would get him the cold shoulder in many quarters today; “buyout specialist” doesn’t have quite the same toxic flavor. “This is the time to roll the dice and take a chance,” he argues.

The problem is that if too many people think the same way as Cruz and Mark, Wall Street could be heading for a brain drain that will make it harder for the giant financial institutions to not only survive, but also to thrive.