Richard "Dick" Fuld, the former chief executive officer of Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc., center, after speaking at the Marcum MicroCap Conference, in New York on May 28. (Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg)

They still don’t get it. That was my reaction when I saw what former Lehman Brothers chief executive Dick Fuld had to say last week in his first voluntary public appearance since the firm collapsed seven years ago. And it’s what struck me when I saw that a big audience cheered him on rather than laughing out loud, which is what I would done.

Fuld drew those cheers from more than 1,000 people at a standing-room-only presentation at the Marcum MicroCap Conference in which he blamed the federal government’s housing policies, the Federal Reserve and irresponsible borrowers for Lehman’s 2008 collapse. Did he blame himself at all? Or Wall Street? Not according to any of the reports that I have read. (I have to rely on others’ reports because I wasn’t at the speech, and the event’s sponsor told me there is no transcript or video available.)

To those of us who remember what happened, Fuld’s refusal to assume any blame for Lehman’s failure is utterly absurd. Lehman was so overextended that a decline of less than 4 percent in the value of its assets was enough to wipe out its capital. Among other things, it stuffed tons of toxic mortgage securities into its portfolio during the housing bubble, and made some large, awful real estate acquisitions. So when the housing market headed south and short-term lenders belatedly realized that Lehman wasn’t exactly a top-tier credit, the firm had no staying power.

It’s the CEO’s job to keep a firm from getting into that kind of trouble — and Fuld didn’t do his job. Even worse, numerous accounts of Lehman’s final days say Fuld was urged to sell Lehman, but he hung tough, played chicken and didn’t realize Lehman’s peril until it was too late. Lehman filed for bankruptcy on Sept. 15, 2008.

Shortly afterward, a run on money-market funds began when the Reserve Primary Fund said it could no longer redeem shares at full value because of losses on Lehman paper. So the federal government had to guarantee trillions of money-market deposits to avoid a disastrous run.

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, which unlike Lehman had been run prudently, were about to fail because hedge funds and other “prime brokerage” customers began yanking their cash and securities in response to prime brokerage assets at Lehman’s London branch being frozen. That forced Uncle Sam to let Goldman and Morgan Stanley become (heavily regulated) bank holding companies so the Fed could shower them with loans.

I don’t know what Fuld thought he was doing by agreeing to speak publicly at the Marcum conference, whose sponsor, Marcum LLP, is a national accounting and advisory firm based in New York City. (Marcum, a once-obscure firm that got tons of attention, is the big winner here).

I tried to talk to Fuld on Monday, but he continued a decades-long pattern of neither accepting nor returning my calls.

Maybe he felt it was time to rewrite history. Or maybe he was trying to hustle business for the firm that he founded in 2009 whose target market is the kind of companies that attend microcap conferences.

Given the damage that Lehman did to the financial system and the extra regulation that Lehman’s failure ultimately forced onto Wall Street, you would think that a financially oriented audience would shower Fuld with rotten tomatoes rather than applause. But you would be wrong.

I suspect that the reason he was cheered is that lots of people on Wall Street, having forgotten history or deciding to ignore it, feel aggrieved. That’s justified to a minor — but only minor — extent. Governments keep treating giant financial firms like ATMs by extracting billions to settle charges of misdeeds. But if the firms hadn’t done things that were wrong, they wouldn’t be vulnerable.

Sure, irresponsible borrowers bear some of the blame for the housing meltdown, and the Fed and Treasury were far from perfect. But if people like Dick Fuld hadn’t been incompetent, shortsighted and greedy — one of my favorite Fuld facts is that he netted $470 million (before taxes) from 1996 through 2007 by exercising Lehman stock options and selling Lehman shares — we would have a lot less government intrusion in the financial system than we have now.

Remember that the next time you hear Dick Fuld or one of his ilk whining. They’re not victims, folks, they’re perpetrators. And that’s the bottom line.