(MONEY Magazine) – After the ruble's collapse, it was all but certain that two well-worn images would quickly reappear: Russians lining up for whatever it is they're always lining up for, and corporate America--represented in this case by banks and Wall Street firms--masquerading as the innocent bystander who happened to be standing under a falling safe.

Here's the routine: Take an event like Russian turmoil, act as if the losses related to it were nobody's fault but God's and then quietly throw in some other earnings disasters too, so that you can release all the bad news at once. It will take weeks before the financial press gets to the real story, and then it's old news. Take Salomon Smith Barney, for example. The Travelers Inc. unit revealed it had staggering credit losses of $360 million in July and August. Predictably, the announcement got lumped into stories about all those financial firms hurt by the ruble's collapse. Unstated was that Smith Barney and its fellow "victims" shouldn't have been betting on Russian stability as if the Kremlin's financial managers were clones of Alan Greenspan. Moreover, only $60 million of Salomon's losses were due to Russia-related credit. The firm also lost $180 million in overseas arbitrage and another $120 million making the wrong bets in the U.S. bond market.

But the storyline was Russian exposure. Not too long ago, it was Asia. Then there was el Nino. Executives at Dole Food Co. tried to explain a near 50% drop in earnings earlier this year on the fact that bad storms had resulted in an oversupply of bananas.

No matter how good companies have gotten at employing accounting to defy logic and continue to meet higher earnings expectations, it's inevitable that the business misjudgments of fallible human beings will catch up with them. It's also inevitable that blame will be placed at somebody else's doorstep--especially if that somebody lives in Moscow or Jakarta.

More scapegoats will be found soon enough. Some earnings growth forecasts for the S&P over the next two years are approaching zero. Rare will be the company that admits it overspent on capital development as the global economy peaked (U.S. automakers, for instance) and now has excess capacity draining profits. Instead, international bogeymen (el Nino was Spanish, right?) will get the blame. Of course, there's always Ken Starr.

--DUFF MCDONALD