“You could really make an argument that financial regulation amounts to merely a little dust splashed on some of them,” a private-equity executive said about his Wall Street colleagues this July, when the idea that nothing had really changed on Wall Street was still a semi-secret. It isn’t any longer.
According to the LA Times, Goldman Sachs (GS) executives are privately advising analysts who cover them that it does not “expect the reform measure to cost it any revenue.” One of those analysts, Guy Moszkowski, told clients that he was surprised by the level of conviction, “but we’ve learned to take such judgments from GS very seriously.”
Another, Dick Bove, had been worried that Goldman was going to be changed by the bill. “Now I’ve figured out that it’s not going to happen,” he said. “They should win big here.”
For that July Observer story, another Wall Street figure, a former senior Lehman executive, compared high finance to football, and the crisis to a bad injury: “You’d get tighter rules. You’d get better helmets. You’d get better this, you’d get better that,” he said. But it’s the same football game. “How else would it be?”
