ARE THEY REALLY ? / THE NEW YORK TIMES EDITORIAL ( RECOMMENDED READING )

January 10, 2010

Editorial

Are They Really?

What’s with the apologies? Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein caught his fellow titans by surprise in November, admitting that “we participated in things that were clearly wrong and have reason to regret.” That came less than two weeks after he infuriated pretty much everyone else by declaring that Goldman was “doing God’s work.”

He was not the only banker indulging in the contrition thing. (In March, Bank of America’s Ken Lewis, who presided over the bungled acquisition of Merrill Lynch, issued his own apology and was still pushed out.) Now the former Time Warner chief executive Gerald Levin, who is not even a banker, has plunged into the zeitgeist.

Mr. Levin issued a belated — by a decade — mea culpa for buying AOL and urged others to follow his lead. “I presided over the worst deal of the century, apparently,” Mr. Levin said. “I guess it’s time for those who are involved in companies to stand up and say: You know what, I’m solely responsible for it.”

Wall Street has a lot to apologize for, but contrition would be more convincing if it came with accountability: a resignation or a decision to forswear bonuses and certainly a pledge to stop trying to block desperately needed financial reforms.

Americans come as well equipped to apologize as anybody. Five minutes on the neighborhood playground will confirm that parents still try their best to instill in their children the merits of saying “I’m sorry.”

True contrition is a rare thing in the American corner office, probably because when children become corporate executives they have lawyers who patiently explain how such good manners could get them in trouble in the land of legal liability. In bankers, this is compounded by a sense that they are truly doing God’s work — not merely gambling with taxpayers’ money.

At play here, we suspect, are both tactics and a sense of history. Legend has it that during the reign of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette responded to her hungry subjects’ demand for bread by declaring, “Let them eat cake.” In hindsight, an apology might have been a better idea. Mr. Blankfein still has his job.

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company