Did you ever make a mistake as a kid? Get into trouble? Break something? Incur the wrath of the authorities, be they parents, teachers, or heaven forbid, the police? Chances are someone sternly looked you in the eye and said something to the effect of, "Well, I hope you learned something from all this."

Once again, the finger of reprisal is pointing our way. Did we learn anything from the financial crisis? Anything? Anything at all?

The answer, it would seem, is "not too much."

Despite a spate of new laws and regulations, tighter capital rules, limits on the activities of investment banks, closer supervision of derivatives trading, and an effort to reform compensation practices, the seeds of the next investment bubble probably have been scattered across the landscape. We won't know where they are until the first shoots break through the ground, and even then, we might miss them until they are tall enough to trip over. We can't see them. They are buried beneath the cold earth's winter crust. But they are there.

Portfolio.com has spent the last 16 months exploring how regulators and financial institutions have sought more effective controls on risk taking, which brought the markets and the economy to the brink of collapse. Beginning in September 2009, financial columnists Suzanne McGee and Gary Weiss and others examined the causes of the crisis, evaluated how regulators and financial institutions were coping with the carnage, and assessed whether risk taking had actually changed in a meaningful way.

As our series on The New Risk ends, here are five lessons, drawn from efforts spanning more than 100 columns:

Perception of risk has changed significantly. Actual risk taking only has changed a little.

Guest columnist David Adler, an expert on behavioral finance, argued in December 2009 that the new approach to risk was more a matter of shifting perception than changing behavior. Adler, the author of the book Snap Judgment and the producer of the PBS documentary Mind Over Money, made the case that "investors have largely the same risk preferences as they did before the crash. They just now are wiser—and poorer."

How can that be? He refers to Nicole Maestas, senior economist at Rand who studies investors’ beliefs. “What has changed after the crash is investors’ expectations of the probability of returns for different investments," Maestas says. But a few bad apples don't spoil one's taste for apples. People still like risk and reward, they just aren't likely to seek them in the assets that have blown up. And when it comes to the pursuit of those gains, they tend to follow along with the herd.

Those insights are as true today as ever. Regulations, laws, and technology might check our impulses, but they can't change them. People will always overdo it. If we cut back on smoking, watch out for the trans fats and salts. There's always something else to tempt us.

When it comes to risk, behavior is hard to change because most of us are governed by instinct and regulated by social norms set by the people around us. That—not greed, per se—is why bubbles keep recurring.

Wall Street is not geared toward solving problems, but exploiting them.

The expectation that banks and other financial institutions would avoid problems, or learn from their mistakes, may reflect a lack of understanding about how such entities work. Wall Street is geared toward making money in any environment, good or bad.

Bad environments often produce the best returns because that is when confusion and volatility are on the rise, and that creates opportunities to benefit from mispriced assets. The fact that exotic structured credit is overpriced isn't an obstacle for a Wall Street trader. He just needs to know whether he should be long or short. The truth is, Wall Street players have no incentive to avoid bubbles: They just need to make damn sure their timing is right. So don't expect Wall Street to work toward a less risky environment.

McGee, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and the author of Chasing Goldman Sachs, says it is tough to expect financial institutions to address their problems when that is clearly outside of the nature of their work. It's like asking the horses to lock themselves into the corral at night. She summed up the dilemma in July 2010 as one of fiduciary duty to the client:

Certainly, by the time reporters began asking hard questions about Wall Street’s inability to “just say no” to marketing products that they could have or should have known contained more risk to their clients than they were disclosing, many of those bankers reacted to those queries with incomprehension rather than reasoned arguments. It wasn’t up to them to do the due diligence for their clients or to second-guess their clients’ risk tolerance or level of sophistication, ran the most commonly heard response. If clients wanted above-average levels of return on their fixed-income portfolios in a low-interest-rate environment, the often-heard corollary went that the responsibility of the investment bank was to find a way to provide it.

Technology has introduced a new element of risk into the markets.

You can't blame the credit bubble on technology alone. People found plenty of ways to get into financial trouble before the invention of the Internet. (See: Crash of '29.) But today's technology is difficult to understand, both in its operation and in its effects. Therefore, it's difficult to control. And its inscrutability is inclined to inspire awe and overconfidence. We tend to hold high-tech in high regard, because it is produced by highly educated and compensated people. We assume they know what they are doing. They assume they know what they are doing. Sometimes, that's not the case. Just go ask Dr. Frankenstein.

The market's robotic monster broke free of its chains on May 6, 2010—the day of the so-called Flash Crash. The problem isn't so much the technology itself, but the inability of institutions and regulators to come up with rules and market structures that make sense, given today's tech. McGee explains:

What matters isn't that high-frequency trading happens. Rather, it's about how to deal with the consequences of the fact that investors and traders now execute in milliseconds (and expect to continue to doing so) rather than in multisecond increments. Instead, that reality—which isn't going to vanish any more than will the technology that made it possible—requires an adjustment on the part of the rules governing market structure.

Wall Street's leaders are unchastened by the crisis.

It's one thing for Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, or Jamie Dimon, the boss at JPMorgan Chase, to appear less than humbled before Congress or in meetings with the White House. But even Dick Fuld, the former CEO of failed Lehman Brothers, offers little in the way of contrition, let alone understanding. Last year, Fuld claimed to be unaware of suspicious asset swaps that masked the value of the doomed company's liabilities. And he blamed the Federal Reserve for not coming to Lehman's aid. Weiss, a former BusinessWeek writer and the author of books including Wall Street Versus America, summed up one of the key lessons of the financial crisis, which he gleaned from watching Fuld testify on September 1, 2010 before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.

I was pondering this as I was watching the testimony of…Fuld before the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission last week. Now we’ve got it straight. None of it was his fault, you see. It was the Fed. It should have rescued the firm that he rammed into the ground.

Blaming the Federal Reserve for the legendary shortcomings of Lehman Brothers is like a child blaming his parents for not coming faster to the rescue when he sticks his hamster in the microwave. Nobody in his right mind believes him, but, hey, that’s his story. It’s so off the wall, so much at variance with the historical record, ranging from journalistic inquiries to every book produced on the crisis to the report by Lehman’s own bankruptcy examiner, that his latest litany of excuses had a surrealistic air.

What we’ve learned from the crisis, from the destruction of our savings, from the job losses many of us have experienced, from the credit crunch that has strangled lending to small business—the moral of the story is that people like Fuld haven’t learned any lessons. They haven’t changed. They are as arrogant and clueless today as they were when they were pulling their firms and this economy into ruination. The lesson of the crisis is that the Dick Fulds of this world have no remorse, no sense of responsibility, and no shame.

Given the tendency of people like Fuld to emerge at the top of the Wall Street heap, Wall Street's culture itself is a form of systemic risk. That isn't to say that everyone or even most of the people on Wall Street are in his league. But it only takes a few individuals in right places—as CEOs or traders—to do a lot of damage. Until that changes, Wall Street's risk profile will remain pretty much what it is today.

And it isn't just the big firms and major miscreants such as Bernard Madoff who are to blame. As Weiss has documented again and again, the micro-cap stock market remains susceptible to fraud that creates risk for investors and institutions.

Yes, a better compensation system would help, but that won't solve the problem. No system will reduce corruption or criminal intent. That sort of change comes from people who are inclined to act prudently, even if it means that maximum profits are sacrificed. Weiss said in February 21010 that today's bankers would be well advised to reacquaint themselves with the late banker Edmond Safra.

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.”

The flip side of Wall Street's strong but often errant leadership is the weak-willed enforcement by regulators.

When it comes to finance, the regulatory record has been a disaster. Lawmakers and regulators missed the credit bubble as it inflated before their eyes. They took a pass on regulating the burgeoning derivatives business. They snoozed as Madoff pulled off the biggest Ponzi scheme in history. State regulators, a bulwark against micro-cap fraud in previous years, have relaxed. And all but the most serious offenses are dealt with in civil court. Criminal prosecutions are rare indeed.

The one person who was bold enough to take on Wall Street—Eliot Spitzer—destroyed his career in a sex scandal, just when enforcement efforts were really needed. It can only be hoped that New York's newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo, and the state's new attorney general, Eric Schneiderman, will live up to their promises to do a better job and put pressure on an often lax federal Securities and Exchange Commission to follow in their path.

Part of the problem is that the SEC is outgunned. Another part is simple failure—remember those SEC folks who were busted for watching porn while they were at work? And then there are systematic issues: regulators can cash in their years of public service by taking lucrative jobs in the private sector. Regulators themselves are culled from the ranks of the regulated, and they often go back to the private sector with even more earning power than before.

That, as Weiss said in September 2009, is known as "regulatory capture."

Stronger capital rules and limits on compensation and the scope of financial institutions may help curb financial excess. But until market participants overcome a too-much-is-never-enough mentality and regulators step up to the plate, the new risk will look pretty much like the old.

Now, back to that wagging finger. Have we learned anything from what happened here?

In all probability, we are no safer from financial risk than we were in 2006, at the height of the last bubble.

There are plenty of potential problems in the market. Have investors poured too much money into emerging markets? Treasury debt? Junk bonds? Stocks? Gold? Commodities? Startups such as Groupon and Facebook? We won't recognize it until the bubble has burst. An unexpected shift in inflation, economic growth, geopolitics, or interest rates could make the folly of our investment choices clear.

The Dodd-Frank financial reform law may help mitigate such risks, but it won't be a panacea. It has forced the banks out of proprietary trading, but that will only push the trading operations elsewhere. And as the Long Term Capital Management crisis of the '90s teaches us, a moderately sized, independent hedge fund can pose systemic risk to the global financial system. And technology and brains are no safeguard against disaster, either—LTCM had two Nobel Prize winners on its staff.

What we are left with is the savanna—an impulse to hunt and kill, and once prey is found, to run with the pack. The very symbol of Wall Street—found on Broadway in Lower Manhattan—is a sculpture of a bull itself. It is meant to connote strength and animal spirits, but it also represents instinct and herd behavior. By and large, the leaders of that herd run our financial institutions and staff our regulatory agencies as well. Once in a while, a smart hunter breaks off from the pack, but few are equipped for that lonely life.

Most of us run with the herd, and no amount of regulation, restructuring, enforcement, or computer power is likely to tame that risk.

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Steve Rosenbush is the blogs/industry editor for Portfolio.com.