In the past month or so, some regrets expressed in the midst of the newsflow on the ongoing global financial and economic crisis. Alan Greenspan [1]put it on record that he had been mistaken in assuming that banks could properly self-regulate. More recently some of the excesses of executive pay for poor governance and performance is being partly paid back or forgone, at UBS [2] and AIG. And this past week Sir Tom McKillop, apologised to shareholders, customers and former and present employees of the Royal Bank of Scotland, for the state the bank has gotten into, now majority owned by the British taxpayer. Genuine and public apologies are of course rare, and possibly even rarer are public acceptance and forgiveness. Nothing can now cancel or make much redress for the coming global economic downturn. Though such contrition wins attention, the players that more likely deserve recognition are those banks that held firm during the boom times, that did not succumb to the seduction of easy money and the pressure to pursue it, but held steadily to a conservatism that by today appears to have served them well indeed.