A Wall Street failure who takes his own life isn't doing anything honorable.

The people whose affairs the financier has disturbed are left in at least as much of a lurch as they were while he lived -- though now, perhaps they feel not only aggrieved by their losses but party to a suicide. Do any of Mr. de La Villehuchet’s clients feel better now? I doubt it.

Just now the financial industry has a big responsibility- taking problem on its hands. Financial professionals have helped to create, out of the clear blue sky, an economic catastrophe. They’ve made vast sums doing things that now can be seen to have had negative social value: misleading giant Wall Street firms; deluding their clients and themselves, allowing themselves to be duped by con men like Bernie Madoff.

No doubt many of them do not wish ever to “shoulder the blame.” Even if they did, how would they go about it?

Begin with what they shouldn’t do: make some great public display of how bad they feel, and how they have now seen the light.

If your response to our economic catastrophe is to go out and shop a memoir or a screenplay or an inspirational lecture series of your spiritual rebirth, you are not taking responsibility. You are merely following the fashion of the moment as slavishly as you did when you sold those mezzanine CDOs.

The world once rewarded you for selling the CDOs; now the world might reward you for saying how much you regret having done so. The odds are pretty good that it’s the incentives, and not you, that have changed. The time to display your sincere disapproval of your own financially idiotic or destructive behavior was back before they fired you, or canceled your next three bonuses.