NEW YORK - The Wall Street that shaped the financial world for two decades ended Sunday night, when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley concluded there is no future in remaining investment banks now that investors have determined the model is broken.
The Federal Reserve's approval of their bid to become banks ends the ascendancy of the securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and caps weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers Holding Inc. into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp.
"The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it," said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. "It's too bad."
I don't think so; I think the whole thing should be allowed to crash, let the elite richers feel the pain, and then the PUBLIC will PICK UP the PIECES and BUILD a BETTER COUNTRY!!!
Goldman, whose alumni include Henry Paulson, the Treasury secretary presiding over a $700 billion bailout, and Morgan Stanley, a product of the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act that cleaved investment and commercial banks, insisted they didn't need to change course, even as their shares plunged and their borrowing costs soared last week.
Sort of a CONFLICT of INTEREST for old King Paulson, no?
Goldman, the largest and most profitable of the US securities firms, will become the fourth-largest bank holding company. The firm already has more than $20 billion in customer deposits in two subsidiaries and is creating a new one, GS Bank USA, that will have more than $150 billion of assets, making it one of the 10 largest banks in the United States, the firm said. The firm will increase its deposit base "through acquisitions and organically," Goldman said.
So why do they need BILLIONS of dollars in TAXPAYER MONEY?
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