Wall Street’s regret for its role in the financial crisis—what contrition looks like, how it’s expressed, why it exists in the first place, and then why it doesn’t—has come to the forefront this week. That’s thanks to sorely differing performances at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission from two former Citigroup executives last Thursday, not to mention statements from former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan and a rare shareholder letter from Goldman Sachs the day before.

“Let me start by saying I’m sorry. I’m sorry that the financial crisis has had such a devastating impact on our country,” Chuck Prince, Citi’s former chief executive, said Thursday. “I’m sorry for the millions of people, average Americans, who have lost their homes.”

But Bob Rubin, the former chairman of the executive committee board at the same bank (where he made more than $100 million), said he did not have much control at Citi. What’s more, he said, nearly everyone else failed to foresee the crisis, too. His relative defiance, and Mr. Prince’s emotional explanation of what went wrong and how it can change, are two prototypes for how Wall Street looks at its past.

SLIDESHOW: 'The Wall Street Sorry Scale' >

Now that the Dow closed above 11,000 for the first time in 18 months on Monday, is there a point to forcing leading executives to explain past mistakes? “And what if, after all that vitriol,” The Times’ Andrew Ross Sorkin wrote Monday, naming skeptical economists like Nouriel Roubini, Joseph Stiglitz and Times columnist Paul Krugman, who the next day explained why an apology was in order, “it turned out that taxpayers might actually lose nothing, or even make a profit? Could it be?”

The message from Wall Street, in other words: move along.

MILD SEMI-REGRET IS more common than non-apologies and passionate atonement. On the day before the Citibank testimony, Mr. Greenspan said he’d been wrong 30 percent of the time, but would not elaborate, and he opened his remarks by blaming foreign historic events, like the Berlin Wall’s fall, on where we are today.

In November, likewise, Goldman Sachs chief Lloyd Blankfein said the firm had “participated in things that were clearly wrong and we have reasons to regret and apologize for,” but did not explain what the things or the reasons were. On the morning of Mr. Greenspan’s speech, Goldman released a letter to shareholders that said the bank did not “‘bet against’ our clients.”

On Friday, the investigative newsroom ProPublica released a massive profile of Magnetar, a hedge fund that created and bet against massive bundles of subprime mortgage investments that soon became worthless. Responding to that report, the hedge fund denied that it had any intent or reason to believe that its subprime securities were built to fail.

The next day, Frank Rich’s column was headlined “No One Is to Blame for Anything.” But, to be fair, there have been dozens of apologies from financiers, just odd ones. Wall Street, after all, has become savvier since William Vanderbilt’s “the public be damned” and J.P. Morgan’s “I owe the public nothing.”

“We’ve said repeatedly that we are disappointed in our performance and that it wasn’t up to our standards,” Ed Sweeney, spokesperson for the credit-rating agency S&P, said this week. “I think, frankly, that people—I’m trying to think of the word here—ratings are only one piece of the investment-decision-making process, and the investment-research process, and that’s how we think they should be used.”

“Among our disappointments has been the ratings of mortgage-backed securities issued between 2005 and 2007,” S&P president Deven Sharma told Congress in September. “Over the course of 150 years, however, our track record is something in which our people can take pride.”

“Did the company make mistakes? I’ve never used the word ‘mistake,’” Mr. Sweeney said.

The Morgan Stanley chairman John Mack stands alone as the only big Wall Street boss who has consistently said otherwise, though he stepped down this year as CEO. In a high-finance version of the famous scene from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, there was silence from his seven peers when the House Financial Services Committee asked if there was a need for apology. “Anyone,” a committee member said. Mr. Mack responded by describing years of mistakes.
This November he pressed for more regulation. “We cannot control ourselves,” he said. “I’m behind closed doors with these people all the time,” Morgan Stanley spokesperson Jeanmarie McFadden said, “and people legitimately understand that things must change.”

JPMorgan’s chief, Jamie Dimon, even if he doesn’t have a reputation for unabashed pride, has not been as forthcoming. “We did make mistakes,” he said at the first crisis commission hearing in January, “and there were things we could have done better.”

“What should we apologize for?” the New York Post wrote the next day, quoting a Wall Street insider. “I’ll tell you this much, we do a lot more for America than Congress does.”

That hearing marked the one-year anniversary of John Thain’s departure from Merrill Lynch. When he left, he apologized for the infamous $1.2 million renovation of his office, “in the light of the world we live in today.” In a following interview, asked what was wrong with predecessor Stan O’Neal’s office, he said, “Well, his office was very different than the general décor of Merrill’s offices. It really would have been very difficult for me to use it in the form that it was in. And you know, I, it needed to be renovated no matter what.”

SOMETIMES THERE ARE no apologies at all. In the second-to-last paragraph of his recent memoir, former Treasury Secretary and Goldman chief Hank Paulson explains, “I don’t mean to minimize our troubles, but every major country has more-significant problems.”

The lobbyist Scott Talbott, a senior vice president for the Financial Services Roundtable, said that while Wall Street isn’t entirely innocent, it’s not the villain. “The basic fundamental problem occurred at the kitchen table, where the borrower got a mortgage that they couldn’t afford to repay. So if you’re fixing the system,” he said, “you’ve got to focus on the kitchen table.”

To the extent that Wall Street apologizes, with a few exceptions, it gives the sense that the crisis was caused by a regrettable combination of rivals’ incompetence, some bad judgment that’s since been remedied, a great deal of historic bad luck and gruesome governmental failures that make them look relatively blameless. Life goes on.

James Kwak, who wrote the book 13 Bankers with the former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson, said that’s part of an “intellectual cover-up.” What he means is that when Mr. Rubin or Mr. Greenspan describes the crisis as an unforeseeable natural disaster, despite the evidence to the contrary, it distracts from the man-made causes.

“There was a conscious intention to break down the regulatory system and to make sure that the banks were essentially allowed to do whatever they wanted to do, especially when it came to new products,” he said.

Barbara Kellerman, a lecturer at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government who has written about leaders’ contrition, says that what’s important about apologies are timeliness and sincerity, and what comes along with them. “Nobody begrudges the right people have to make a profit, and the more profit the better,” she said, “but in a way that’s reasonably fair and adhering to the law, and not corrupt, and not greedy to the point of nausea.”

“The issue is,” said the Wall Street firm’s chief of communications source, pointing to rivals who were more heavily leveraged, “if we were to say we were sorry, what would we say we’re sorry for?”

mabelson@observer.com