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.

This wouldn't have been possible without John Meriwether, perhaps the founding father of the No-Consequences movement. Meriwether presided over Long-Term Capital Management's demise, the most spectacular hedge fund blowup ever. It put the global financial system into such peril that the Federal Reserve had to intervene. For his recklessness, Meriwether was sentenced to Greenwich, Connecticut, where he manages billions at his new hedge fund.

Once, it was considered polite to at least shake your head (with envy if you were a hedge fund manager, with disgust if you were just about anyone else) when referring to Meriwether's comeback. Now? Dow Kim and Tom Maheras held top positions at Merrill Lynch and Citigroup, respectively, overseeing those firms' disastrous moves in the credit markets. But by January, the two were bouncing back. Kim was raising money for a new hedge fund. Maheras was choosing between taking a top job in finance and getting $1 billion to start his own fund. (That seems to be the preferred escape hatch: Even Brian Hunter, of the failed hedge fund Amaranth, has been able to raise money to hang out his shingle.) Instead of golden parachutes, they get golden trampolines.

Heads I Win; Tails I Win

What does it tell us when Angelo Mozilo, the head of mortgage lender Countrywide, spent months selling his stock while proclaiming that the company would weather the housing slump, and then, when the market failed, sold it to Bank of America and kept his monster compensation? It tells us that the pattern of being rewarded for failure has been laid into the foundation of the speculation society.

There was the junk-bond crisis and the savings-and-loan disaster. There was the regulator-coordinated bailout of L.T.C.M. There were the Fed's shock interest-rate cuts after the Nasdaq bubble popped. Over and over again, there were blunders with no corresponding negative response.

The science of securitization led to a severing of the relationship between lender and borrower. Bankers used to know whom they lent money to, and vice versa. In the past few years, however, borrowers have called a 1-800 number for loans. The ultimate lender didn't know much about the borrowers and didn't really care.

Now plenty of homeowners are walking away from their houses and sending "jingle mail"—putting the keys in an envelope and giving the house to the bank. Effectively, lenders have no recourse. But who can blame the little speculators when the big speculators were running amok?

Whole classes of securities and derivatives were devised with No-Consequences logic. Take credit-default swaps, which are supposed to protect buyers from a default on a company or a mortgage security. Soon enough, we will realize that over the past 10 years or so, we created a gigantic insurance market with such investment products. But because we labeled them derivatives, we exempted them from the basic rules and regulations that insurance providers have been subject to for decades. Insurers, when they offer something called insurance, are forced to put some money aside as a reserve so that they can make good on their policies. Not so with derivative alchemists and speculators.

Some stockholders will no doubt sue, and some will win. But settlements are years away and don't provide adequate recompense or sufficient deterrence. Why isn't there a greater shareholder uprising? The fund managers may lose your money, but where else are you going to go? The vast majority manage other people's money too, and many of these investors just check off a box to make their 401(k) allocations.

When All Else Fails, Go Shopping

Of course, there are differences between acting as if there were no consequences and there actually being no consequences. Already, we are adding to the ranks of the laid off, the homeless, the bankrupt, the pensioners on diminishing fixed incomes. Perhaps soon, consequences will affect the instigators as well. "First, there's greed. Then fear. Then retribution," says Simon Mikhailovich, a partner at hedge fund Eidesis Capital. "They are now in fear that the whole system is going down the drain. The next phase is going to be the show trials and the hangings once it becomes clear what the extent of the damage is."

Ah, but that's where the Fed comes in, cutting interest rates to ease the pain for banks that must struggle to raise money to stanch their losses. Of course, rate cuts have consequences as well: a ruined dollar, runaway inflation, moral hazard.

A better way would be to curb incentives for speculation. Mitchell, the G.W.U. professor, argues for high short-term capital-gains taxes to penalize the flippers. Wall Street bonuses should vest over time, with mechanisms to claw back ill-gotten fortunes. That way, if a deal goes bad three years in, bankers forfeit their bonuses. The obvious hurdle, though, is that no bank would move first. For this reform, we need a greater crisis and a regulatory mandate. Finally, banks and other financial institutions should be paying insurance to the Fed or the Treasury at all times for the right to access credit lines at below-market rates during emergencies. There is no reason that this particular industry should be subsidized in times of crisis if it hasn't paid in during good times.

At this point, however, little is likely to change. It's time to refinance. The government hands people money in the form of a tax rebate and asks them to spend it. When our political leaders need the country to come together, they give us cash and urge us to buy something nice for ourselves. Go to the mall.