By ALESSANDRA STANLEY


I MISS THE SEX. The United States is engrossed in an orgy of scandal, a 24-hour cable news burlesque of greed, graft, cronyism and corruption, with appointed villains so lurid and over-the-top they could be characters in “Bleak House.”(Even their names, Madoff and Blagojevich, have a Dickensian ring, like Skimpole or Pardiggle.)

The most salacious news stories pivot on money, not mistresses or prostitutes. It’s the 10th anniversary of Monicagate and the impeachment of President Clinton, and even the Fox News Channel cannot summon the energy to dwell on the semen-stained dress. The recession has many victims, but one of the least heralded is the collapse of the juicy sex scandal. It seems like ages since anyone cared about John Edwards’s extramarital affair. Madonna’s divorce settlement is a footnote.

In normal times, sex and celebrity misconduct are the main distraction to grim news developments and natural disasters. Economists have many ways of defining an economic slump, but perhaps the clearest indicator is the scandal factor: when greed trumps lust, and fraud is more fascinating than infidelity, it’s safe to say that the recession has arrived.

Credit is frozen, the stock market looks perilously close to crashing, and neither politicians nor economists can begin to predict the short- or long-term consequences of $700 billion government bailouts and a national debt topping $10 trillion. The root causes - an impenetrable tangle of derivative securities, heedless lending and binge corporate buyouts - are too vast and uncharted to examine for long. The solutions are insoluble.

It’s easier, and oddly enough, more reassuring, to focus on familiar, old-fashioned swindles and bribes. However grotesque and outsize, Ponzi schemes and Chicago political machine shakedowns are comfort scandals - they are suitably horrifying, but not so alien and unprecedented that ordinary taxpayers are afraid to even take a peek. And those lurid misdeeds have all but shoved Internet porn rings, starlet sex tapes and Hollywood break ups off the screen. Put it this way: on “Dateline” on the NBC television network, Chris Hansen, the star of the “To Catch a Predator” segments, is once again tracking down predators, only this time, Mr.Hansen is not confronting his usual prey - pedophiles who lure children over the Internet. He is after predatory lenders who enticed gullible homebuyers into taking on mortgages they couldn’t afford.

Bernard L.Madoff (who may have presided over a $50 billion Ponzi scheme) and Governor Rod Blagojevich of Illinois (who stands accused of trying to sell President- elect Barack Obama’s Senate seat), even before their days in court, are twin symbols of crisis-era thievery and corruption, but they cannot be considered scapegoats.

Mostly they serve as sexual surrogates: the shady transactions they’re accused of titillate the public the way the naughty escapades of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton once did.

But there are plenty of other pecuniary trespasses for viewers to leer at, notably a report on MSNBC news recently, based on a gossip item posted on the Web site The Daily Beast, that told of a recent Hermes shopping spree by Kathleen Fuld, the wife of Richard S.Fuld, the disgraced chief executive of the now defunct Lehman Brothers.(The report said her purchases included three $2,225 cashmere shawls.)

The MSNBC story suggested that Mrs.Fuld and her ilk have taken to asking store clerks to place their luxury items in plain, unmarked shopping bags to avoid the sneers of passers-by. And, if true, for good reason: in today’s climate, names like Hermes and Prada are so sinful that even news personalities feel compelled to disavow them.

After the “secret shopper” story was shown, the MSNBC anchor Tamron Hall corrected the reporter’s pronunciation of Hermes, then quickly denied any firsthand knowledge of the shop.

“I only learned it on‘Oprah,’”Ms.Hall said hurriedly.“That is the store that wouldn’t let Oprah Winfrey in, in Paris; that’s my sole exposure to Hermes.”

Class resentment is all the rage. Drug abuse and divorce were until recently the usual focus points for gossip about the Kennedys. Now, Caroline Kennedy is under tabloid attack, but the charge is presumption: even on TV, commentators openly scoff at her brief, somewhat stilted tour of upstate New York and complain that she is seeking appointment to public office with a queenly sense of entitlement. (And it’s not unfair to note that her request for the New York Senate seat, on the heels of her crucial endorsement of Barack Obama, carries a whiff of Chicago- style politics - Blagojevichism with better manners.)

It won’t last forever, of course. Exposes of financial chicanery will lose their novelty, less colorful chiselers will take the stage (or the tumbril), and someday soon enough, sex scandals will be back (ideally, with a Wall Street chief executive officer canoodling with prostitutes on his soonto- be repossessed company jet on his way to an about-to-go-bankrupt luxury resort in St.Barts).

At the moment, however, taxpayers are full of wrath at slothful Securities and Exchange Commission regulators; they envy bosses of bailed-out companies who are taking home lavish bonuses. Ordinary folks are revolted by the gluttony of high-flying A.I.G. executives wining and dining their way through bankruptcy, and offended by prideful car industry executives who take private jets to beg Congress for alms.

The seventh deadly sin has fallen by the wayside.