“I mean, if you had a bus driver who went 100 miles an hour on an icy road, you’d think he was crazy,” he adds. “But if his boss said, ‘It’s our policy to drive faster as the roads get icier,’ you wouldn’t be surprised if the boss ended up in jail.”

By historical standards, this is not Wall Street’s worst bout of infamy, though it might come pretty close. Last week, President Obama branded Wall Street bankers “shameful” for giving themselves nearly $20 billion in bonuses, even though the average bonus, $112,000, was down by 36.7 percent from the prior year.

That criticism isn’t quite the buggy whippings that Franklin Delano Roosevelt routinely gave “unscrupulous money changers.” And the recent rallies in front of the New York Stock Exchange  with chants of “You bought it, you broke it”  are downright peaceful compared to the 1920 bombing of J.P. Morgan’s offices, which killed more than 30 people.

Still, if your business card bears the name of an investment bank  or did before you were laid off  odds are good you’ve endured some very awkward moments of late. Stephen Chen, a former vice president in equity research at Bear Stearns, heard a lot of sarcastic comments when he went home to the Bronx for Christmas, where his family of 36 gather each year. When the story of another bank closing was broadcast on a TV, a cousin muttered, “Good riddance.”

“A lot of my family are small-businessmen who own restaurants and Laundromats,” Mr. Chen said. “They just see Wall Street as overpaid and they don’t have a very clear idea of what it does. I try to explain that there’s this intimate connection between Main Street and Wall Street, that banks were created to provide liquidity for small businesses, so they can expand.” His relatives listen, but seem unconvinced, Mr. Chen said. “It’s kind of tiring having the same conversation over and over again.”

The irony is that despite public perceptions, the outcry over Wall Street greed is happening just as the firms are getting stingy. At JPMorgan, Ms. Chau said, management clamped down on office supplies to the point where employees now need to ask a secretary for the key to the supply room for pens.

Image Stephen Chen, formerly of Bear Stearns, has endured his relatives skeptical views of the imploding world of high finance. Credit... Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

At the San Francisco branch of Goldman Sachs, the days of free soy milk and Diet Cokes are over, and one day, the water cooler was wheeled right out of the office. “Word went around pretty quickly,” says Mr. Pleitez. “Bring your own water.”