New Normal on Wall Street: Smaller and Restrained With firms like Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley reporting weak results for last year, Wall Street is having to confront doubts about itself. 

Is this a temporary slump? Or will the moneymakers never get to go back to their high-rolling ways? Many on Wall Street had hoped 2011 would be a year when the investment banks showed that they could still make solid profits in the more sober financial environment that has followed the 2008 crisis. 

Instead, Goldman Sachs’s earnings fell 67 percent last year; Bank of America’s investment banking operation, which includes Merrill Lynch, suffered a 53 percent decline in net income; and Morgan Stanley’s earnings were down by 42 percent. 

“No matter how you cut it, the Goldman Sachs of tomorrow is not going to be the Goldman Sachs of 1999, when it did its I.P.O., or the Goldman Sachs of 2006, when it was at the high point of the cycle,” said Brad Hintz, a senior analyst with Sanford C. Bernstein & Company.
this information was taken from www.nytimes.com