New York's Stuyvesant High School has always attracted a lot of attention. It is widely seen as the best as well as the most selective public high school in the city and one of the top ranked high schools in the country. Many parents consider the school an express train to Ivy League colleges.

However, the latest spotlight shone on the school isn't a matter for pride but for embarrassment. During the final exams of last semester, more than 60 students were found to have been exchanging answers through their cellphones. The scandal dogged the school through the whole summer.

The longtime principal who busted the cheating ring retired abruptly after it was made public. The chief engineer of the ring, 16-year-old student Nayeem Ahsan, was kicked out. And the students involved were suspended from classes for one to two weeks and had to retake all the exams.

The media was relentless in pursuing the scandal. Even months after the story first broke, there are still news reports popping up.

However jaded I am by the media storm, I couldn't put down the 6,000 words story in a recent issue of New York Magazine and I couldn't help laughing heartily at the end.

The story profiled Ahsan and found he was somewhat remorseful. But it also thought he had suffered some bad luck by being discovered.

The kicker to the article was him telling the reporter that he wished to be enrolled in a high school decent enough to enable him to pursue a future career. And then, he told the curious reporter: "I want to be an investment banker."

Everyone who lived in the US through the recent financial crisis can immediately understand why I chuckled. 

It's true that in the US, one doesn't have to worry too much about being duped by street vendors using manipulated scales, being swindled by online retailers who take your money but do not send you the product, or being gouged by taxi drivers who deliberately take longer routes.       

But the US culture's zero tolerance for cheating seems to, just like many other virtues valued by the culture, have some fundamental limits.

We all know George H. W. Bush once told the voters: "Read my lips. No new taxes" and then went on to raise taxes. We all remember Bill Clinton told the press: "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," when his semen was found on Monica Lewinsky's dress. Vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan told a radio host he finished a marathon in "two hours and 50-something," when it was actually more than four hours.

This all seems almost allowable.

We also remember that the banks once vied to lend money for mortgages to whoever asked even if they were buying much bigger houses than they could afford.

This later caused millions of people to lose their homes and dragged the entire world into the financial crisis. The banks then got taxpayers to bail them out but resisted any plans for taxpayers to bail out the troubled homeowners.

Hardly anyone has been punished.

Indeed, the financial crisis changed little on Wall Street.

A recent survey of 500 financial services professionals in the US and UK released by law firm Labaton Sucharow found that 39 percent of respondents believed their competitors have engaged in illegal or unethical activity in order to be successful, 24 percent of respondents believed it's necessary to do so to be successful on Wall Street, and 16 percent said they would commit insider trading if they could get away with it.

So if you are a politician or investment banker, and have access to power and money, you are basically exempt from the ethics of average people.

The only thing that could stop Ahsan fulfilling his dream may not be that he cheated, but that he was caught. Wall Street, after all, doesn't welcome losers.

The author is a New York-based journalist. rong_xiaoqing@hotmail.com