Not since Ward and June Cleaver looked after the Beaver have we enjoyed such a feast of responsibility. When New Century Financial, a purveyor of disastrous subprime mortgages, failed to deliver hundreds of thousands of documents to a court-appointed bankruptcy examiner, the company accepted "full responsibility" in a filing with the court. The now-former chairman of British bank Northern Rock told the Times of London that his board of directors takes "full responsibility" for going belly-up. And IndyMac, an American provider of toxic mortgages, "could have done some things differently," according to its C.E.O., who said, "I take full responsibility for this." (View an interactive feature that calculates how much shareholders are due back.)

Full responsibility is one thing. Consequences are another.

We have reached escape velocity and launched into the No-Consequences Economy. To pause for a moment of overgeneralization: America used to be about exceptionalism and optimism, a place where anybody could try anything and make it work. Across the business and political spectrum, it's now about entitlement, where everyone deserves a shot but no one gets blamed for screwing it up. Stuff happens, as Donald Rumsfeld said, referring to another affair with no consequences for the architects. (Read more about the consequences of no consequences.)

When Bob Nardelli said in September 2006 that he took "full responsibility" for manhandling Home Depot, how was he to know that he'd be kicked out four months later with an extra $210 million in the bank? Or that he'd end up at the wheel of an American icon, Chrysler? Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal, who also mouthed the responsibility platitude, received $160 million when he was dumped after billions of dollars of bets went bad and word leaked out that he had toyed with selling the company without talking to his board.

Other disgraced Wall Street executives are hot commodities in the job market, valued for their perceived ability to walk through fire and survive. Private equity firms are turning away from deals signed mere months before. J.C. Flowers & Co. even managed to leave Sallie Mae at the altar and not pay the contractually negotiated breakup fee. Housing-industry shills who championed a rising market are keeping their jobs. Banks that made disastrous loans are cutting in line to borrow at below-market rates from the Federal Reserve. "It's amazing, the lack of shame," says Lawrence Mitchell, a George Washington University professor and author of The Speculation Economy: How Finance Triumphed Over Industry. "The guys on Wall Street claim they believe in free markets and are entitled to enormous compensation because of their risk taking. But when they lose, do they say to themselves, 'I'm going to take my losses'? No, they go running to Uncle Ben"—Ben Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman—"and he, in a grotesquely irresponsible move, bails them out."

Failing Is Not the Same as Failing

As usual, pervasive cultural phenomena reach their apex on Wall Street. Last year was a financial horror show. Three of the biggest Wall Street banks suffered the worst quarterly losses in their histories. Shareholders lost more than $80 billion, according to Bloomberg. Yet Wall Street's five largest firms paid a record $39 billion in bonuses for 2007, up from the previous year, when they had logged their biggest profits ever. And that $39 billion figure isn't simply plumped by winners like Goldman Sachs either. Morgan Stanley's bonus pool rose 18 percent last year despite historic fourth-quarter losses.

Wall Street bosses used to justify paying big bonuses by arguing that they had no choice if they wanted to recruit top talent. Now the distinction between those who get it right and those who don't no longer exists. Failure is the new success. Traders face asymmetrical choices: massive upside if they win while wagering other people's money and zero personal downside if they lose. It doesn't matter what happens to the company as a whole. As Harvard finance professor Randy Cohen explains, the way an employer would get maximum effort is to offer what's known as the "cement shoes" contract. If the employee does well, he becomes wealthy; if he doesn't, he's killed. Try finding someone to take that job. The rational employee will take a lower upside if promised something in the event of bad luck or failure.

"Attracting talent by guaranteeing they will make good money matters a lot more than incentivizing them by saying, 'If you screw up, you'll be panhandling,' " Cohen says. "Markets are not in the business of doling out proper rewards for morality."

Sure, there seem to have been sacrifices. We can bow our heads for Citigroup's Chuck Prince and Bear Stearns' James Cayne, neither of whom is likely to get another top job anytime soon. (Of course, we thought that about Nardelli too.) John Mack, Morgan Stanley's C.E.O., decided to go without a bonus in 2007. But such examples are only superficially consequential. Mack was paid more than $40 million in 2006 even though he encouraged moves that led to losses the following year—and beyond. As the Financial Times' Martin Wolf has pointed out, the calendar is an astronomical, not economic, phenomenon. Bankers shouldn't be paid based on the arbitrary rolling over of the year.

Eat, Drink, and Be Merry, for Tomorrow We Make More Money

When Cerberus Capital Management chose Nardelli to serve as the head of Chrysler, it gave us our patron saint of No-Consequences. Nardelli arrived at Home Depot ablaze with ideas about financial efficiencies but with little feel for his customers, suppliers, or employees. He bounced into one of the most delicate roles in American business, helming a company that is a symbol of the country's grand manufacturing past as well as its decaying present.