Is Wall Street sorry?

And by "sorry", I mean are our former financial lords and masters genuinely penitent?

It's hard to tell, though Gabriel Sherman's piece for New York magazine, "Is This the End of Wall Street As They Knew It?", tries to make that argument. Not only is legislation enacted in the wake of the financial crisis starting to bite (or at least Wall Street firms are starting to flinch proactively), but some bankers, hedge fund managers and brokers are apparently searching their souls, prompted in part by the Occupy movement.

No one on Wall Street liked to be scapegoated either by the Obama administration or by the Occupiers. But many acknowledge that the bubble-bust-bubble seesaw of the past decades isn’t the natural order of capitalism—and that the compensation arrangements just may have been a bit out of whack. “There’s no other industry where you could get paid so much for doing so little,” a former Lehman trader said.

Not that everyone is regretful. Banking analyst Dick Bove, for one, thinks the reforms instituted in the wake of the financial crisis have "castrated" big financial institutions.

“We’ve made a decision as a nation to shrink the growth of the financial system under the theory that it won’t impact the growth of the nation’s economy.”

Actually, Mr. Bove, I think we've made a decision as a nation that we're just going to have to do without the recent and anomalous growth rate of the financial sector, so as to safeguard the entire economy. What you call "shrinking the growth", the rest of us call "reining in the insanity". We're in our current hole because we tried it your way, remember?

In spite of the hopeful note Sherman's piece sounds, there's still more than a whiff of hot air blowing in some parts of Wall Street. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said:

“The mortgage mess is the biggest financial mess we’ll see in our lifetime.”

I'm not nearly as optimistic as Dimon is.

(Thanks to LongReads for the link.)