At the hearings, Phil Angelides, the head of the commission, repeatedly bemoaned the bankers' failure to apologize or take responsibility for anything.
But the Fed's recent signals of an early exit from QE – together with stronger evidence of China's slowdown and Chinese, Japanese, and European central bankers' failure to provide the additional monetary easing that investors expected – dealt emerging markets an additional blow.
The Bank of England's governor, Mervyn King, declared last week that he was surprised that public outrage over bankers' failures had not been greater.
Except that we've now had a few years' worth of headlines about tax-dodging companies, casino bankers, spectacular delivery failure on public service contracts, and relentless price rises for water, energy and transport driving more citizens into poverty.
It is, however, a troubling law since it tries to impose criminal responsibility on individual bankers for collective failures.
While regulators say they are trying to prevent further bank failures, bankers complain that the examinations amount to nitpicking.
Both for the country's sake and for his own, the prime minister needs to refocus his government on the clear, bold message that he began with.Less pride and prejudiceThere are all sorts of areas where this newspaper disagrees with the government its petulant attitude to Europe, its banker-bashing, its failure to prize immigrants.
And maybe, just maybe, the message from Iceland may be heard by ordinary citizens in other, larger nations, being told they have to make huge sacrifices to pay for the recklessness of bankers and the failures of look-the-other-way "regulators".
As for the bankers, they exhibited a failure of leadership succinctly reflected in the quotation that inspired the title of Blinder's book.
But people are more resentful when bankers are rewarded for failure, or when fortunes are made by rent-seeking rather than enterprise.In the most corrupt countries the rulers simply help themselves to public money.
Page A27 BONUS BABIES In an Op-Ed article, Paul Wilmott, the founder an eponymous journal of quantitative finance, explains the mystery behind the failure of bankers to diversify their companies' portfolios: doing so would have lessened their chances of big bonuses.
