Elected officials have been saying "I'm sorry" for everything from marital affairs to cross dressing to corruption, and CEOs toss around apologies like horseshoes at the company picnic.

Not anymore. As the world comes to grips with the most dire economic conditions in seven decades, the mea culpa machine has ground to a halt. Apologies, encouraged in recent years by the crisis-management industry, have dried up, even apologies deployed as a business or political strategy.

Legal concerns weigh heavily on any words that might be construed as an admission of guilt. But also weighing heavily is the silence from politicians, regulators and past and present CEOs at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, AIG, Bear Stearns, Countrywide Financial, Merrill Lynch and Washington Mutual.

It's been clear for weeks that the financial crisis dammed the free flow of credit. But with each passing day, it's becoming just as clear that the crisis has likewise dammed the free flow of taking responsibility.

When Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld testified on Capitol Hill this month, members of Congress grilled him to own up. Fuld said he takes full responsibility for his decisions, "felt horrible about it," but that the largest bankruptcy in history was due to circumstances beyond his control. Likewise, a trio of past AIG CEOs — Hank Greenberg, Martin Sullivan and Robert Willumstad — deflected blame in oral and written testimony to Congress.

Finger-pointers in Congress have found cover in public opinion polls that show most people blame CEOs for the crisis, but there is blame to go around, with Democrats choosing to ignore warnings about the possible implosion of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Republicans supporting less regulation, says Harvard leadership expert Barbara Kellerman, who wrote a 2006 article in the Harvard Business Review titled "When Should a Leader Apologize — and When Not?"

The absence of apologies has fed widespread outrage. Even CEOs in other industries are upset that they must now negotiate their companies through a recession.

TIME TO EXPRESS REGRET

While few CEOs in the U.S. have yet been outwardly critical of their counterparts in the financial sector, the founder and chairman emeritus of Kyocera, a Japanese electronics giant that employs 65,000, says what others may be thinking.

CEOs who had a hand in the mess "should acknowledge their role and apologize, unreservedly, to their shareholders, stakeholders and the U.S. taxpayers," Kazuo Inamori told USA Today through an interpreter. "They should sincerely reflect on their own management methods. They were too preoccupied with their own desires. They should acknowledge their own faults and, yes, apologize."

However, no one in the U.S. believes they can get to the top by falling on their swords, says Dan McGinn, CEO of TMG Strategies, a public relations firm that counsels companies on threats to their reputations. McGinn says his personal belief is that there is more room for humility and honesty than most executives realize, and the public hungers for candor and authenticity. Apologies, McGinn says, are wrongly perceived as a sign of weakness.

Yet, in the years before the crisis, apologies had become common, almost a sport, and examples can be found on YouTube from everyone from Don Imus to Jesse Jackson to Mel Gibson to Michael Richards of "Seinfeld," to CNBC's "Mad Money" Jim Cramer. Lawyers recommend against admissions of wrongdoing, but companies had come to discount that advice to save reputations and get past bad news. In 2004, professors from the University of Michigan and Stanford University found that companies that accepted blame for poor performance in annual reports outperformed the market the following year.

Companies and physicians alike have found that heart-felt apologies can decrease the likelihood of lawsuits if they are well crafted and don't come off as "Sorry I got caught," but express regret, assume responsibility and map out a plan to avoid repeating the offense, says Leslie Gaines-Ross, chief reputation strategist for public relations firm Weber Shandwick, and a longtime student of apologies in crisis management.

NOTABLE APOLOGIES

Past corporate apologies are too numerous to detail but have come from JetBlue, Amazon, Nielsen, Seagate Technology, Sun Microsystems, Southwest Airlines, Texaco, Procter & Gamble, United Airlines, Ford Motor, Toshiba, Merck, Mattel, Taco Bell and Nike. Even Hank Paulson, now Treasury secretary and a key actor in the global attempt at economic resuscitation, apologized to employees in 2003 when he was CEO of Goldman Sachs for implying that most of them were irrelevant to the firm's success.

Steve Jobs issued an apology when Apple sold iPhones to its most eager customers for $599, then slashed the price two months later to $399. Whole Food CEO John Mackey apologized for writing anonymous posts on financial message boards. Steve Hughes, the former CEO of tea-maker Celestial Seasonings, once wrote a letter of apology in the Boulder, Colo., Daily Camera for poisoning prairie dogs on company property.

Those may have seemed like bad deeds at the time, but they pale compared with the pink slips about to be distributed in the credit crunch aftermath. The clock can't be turned back, but a few sincere "I deeply regrets," would help shift focus from what has happened to what needs to happen next, Gaines-Ross says.

A 2006 Weber Shandwick study found that apologies have become so commonplace that their ability to allay public concern may be eroding. Even so, "CEOs should realize that an apology is not a sign of weakness, but an act of strength," Gaines-Ross says.

Golden Gate University psychologist Kit Yarrow says both CEOs and elected officials operate in dog-eat-dog worlds where strength is rewarded and those with self doubt and regret don't make it to the top.

"It's entirely possible that these individuals haven't internalized that they've made mistakes and therefore, don't feel responsible," Yarrow says. "Many of the folks involved have trained themselves to avoid introspection and second-guessing. It gives you a thick skin and a sense of superiority that shields you from caring what people think of you. And if you don't care what people think, you certainly wouldn't feel the need to apologize."

THE COURTROOM FACTOR

The strongest argument for silence may be the courtroom. Grand jury investigations have begun, Fuld and other executives have received subpoenas, and the standard advice of criminal defense lawyers is to say nothing, says Columbia law professor John Coffee. "Everyone remembers that six months after the fall of Enron and WorldCom, indictments began to come down, and it rained indictments for the next year," he says. "Those who accept responsibility might become the rod that attracts the first bolt of lightning from the prosecutors."

Wrongdoers will have cover only for so long, and some CEOs and elected officials eventually will be identified as key culprits, Kellerman says. She predicts they will likely be exposed by shareholder activists and Web activists. Few hold hope of apologies from elected officials, who don't have to protect the viability of a company and have only their own personal reputations to defend. Congressional apologies often require smoking guns and more often involve sexual scandal than acts of public harm. In Congress, harmful actions are blamed on others, Gaines-Ross says.

"It's hard for most of us to imagine how someone could be responsible for such damage and loss to others and not feel an urgent need to apologize," psychologist Yarrow says. "Obviously some of those investment bankers and politicians aren't like the rest of us."