Nowadays you can’t skim through the financial pages without finding some government official or congressman lashing out at the biggest banks. Meanwhile, the quarterly earnings numbers show bankers losing vast sums of money, even if, as happened with Citigroup, its multibillion-dollar losses “narrowed.” To prevent bankers from continuing to cut their own throats, President Obama has announced a sensible plan to keep banks from taking excessive risks.

Whenever I read about bankers being taken to the woodshed, losing enormous sums of money, or otherwise acting like fools, my thoughts go back to a dumpy little gray-haired man by the name of Edmond Safra. I think to myself, what would Safra do today? The bankers of 2010 would do well to emulate him. Had they acted more like Edmond Safra in recent years and less like Nathan Detroit in Guys and Dolls, we might not be in the current economic mess.

Safra was a tragic figure with an incomplete legacy. He was born in Beirut in 1932 to a Syrian Jewish family that was prominent in banking and gold trading and had financed caravan routes that honeycombed the Ottoman Empire. He had little formal education, no MBA, just a legacy—one that he brought with him to Brazil, where the family fled in the 1940s, then Switzerland, and finally New York. There he established the Republic New York Corp. on East 40th Street in Manhattan, opposite Bryant Park. It became one of the leading banks in America, and by the mid-1990s, his multinational holdings gave him a personal wealth that exceeded $2 billion, which was handsome money at the time.

The tragedy was partly the nature of his death—he died in 1999 in a fire set by a nurse—and partly the unfulfilled promise of his life. For the victims of today’s bankers, the shame is that he did not live to see what became of the industry he cherished—and, perhaps, could have done something to prevent banks from self-destructing, pulling down the economy with them. Safra sold Republic to HSBC a few months before his death, when he retired.

Safra learned banking not in a classroom but old-world style at the feet of his father. He was not perfect. He made mistakes and suffered emerging-markets losses in 1998 like everyone else. But, in most respects, he held closely to the elementary, bedrock principles of banking. His banks were his “children.” When I interviewed him for BusinessWeek in 1994, one of the few times he spoke to the press, it was more of a family visit than a meeting with a starchy chief executive. It was a glatt kosher lunch in his private dining room on the top floor of the building in which he lived, above his bank, filled with Near Eastern art that made it appear more like a wing of the Louvre than a banker’s office.

Looking back on our visit, he brings to mind not other CEOs I’ve interviewed but the merchants I’ve met in India, men for whom trading was second nature. As Safra told it, running a multinational banking empire was a bit like operating a falafel stand or a pawnshop. The first responsibility was to not be stupid. Even then, bankers were being just that—pushing hard into leveraged transactions, making foolhardy commercial real estate bets, and beginning to play with derivatives. Not Safra. “I’m in no hurry to make money,” he said. Banking was, he said, "a simple, stupid business," one whose principles hadn’t really changed over the years. "The book on banking was written 6,000 years ago," he said. In a similar vein, Safra wanted his bank to “last 1,000 years.”