Major banks are shells of what they were, and many are paying large settlements. | AP Photos How Washington beat Wall Street

NEW YORK — In 2009, Washington went to war against big Wall Street banks hoping to blow up the kind of high-risk, high-reward strategies that helped spark the financial crisis. Five years later, that war is largely over. And Washington won in a blowout.

You might not know it given continued demands from Democrats — and even some Republicans — to further bust up the nation’s largest banks. And the standard media refrain is that Wall Street titans always win, no big bank bosses went to jail and the industry will just find new ways to keep the casino open.


But the truth on the ground — at least at this moment in time — is very different.

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Goldman Sachs, the biggest money machine in Wall Street history, is a shell of its former self. Morgan Stanley, Goldman’s one-time bitter rival in the swashbuckling world of high-risk trading, is transforming into a staid money management firm with a side business underwriting stocks and offering merger advice.

Citigroup and Bank of America sold off many of their classic “Wall Street” businesses, including proprietary trading desks and private equity and hedge fund stakes, to comply with the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill.

Washington’s big victory came via widespread public outrage at the financial industry, which paved the way for a strong reform bill. And after President Barack Obama signed Dodd-Frank into law in 2010, the industry made mistake after mistake — from the interest rate rigging scandal to mortgage-foreclosure “robo-signing” — making it essentially impossible for the industry’s lobbyists to beat back any of the newly imposed regulations.

“The scope of activities that U.S. banks engage in has been dramatically reduced,” said Mohamed A. El-Erian, chief executive of giant bond fund manager Pimco, which itself may face new restrictions as regulators turn their attention to the asset management industry. “Even in a period when markets are performing well, the numbers the banks are pulling in are just nowhere near as strong as they once were.”

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Even mighty JPMorgan Chase, once viewed as the only bank to come through the crisis largely unchanged, is now forking over tens of billions of dollars in settlement cash, seemingly on a weekly basis, to pay for its sins before the financial crisis — including allegedly turning a blind eye to the Bernie Madoff fraud and improperly selling risky mortgage securities. JPMorgan this week gave up its coveted title as the nation’s most profitable bank to Wells Fargo, a buttoned down San Francisco-based bank not known as a Wall Street titan.

And JPMorgan’s massive $6 billion loss in the so-called London whale trading scandal in 2012 helped ensure that a very tough version of the ban on proprietary trading by federally backstopped banks — known as the “Volcker rule” — was approved by regulators last month.

The transformation of Wall Street is so complete that even some of the industry’s loudest critics — rarely willing to give an inch — are prepared to declare at least partial victory, albeit with plenty of “time will tell” caveats and complaints about the industry pushing to underfund its regulators in the latest spending bill working its way through Congress.

“There is no question that many of the highest-risk activities, which happened to be the most profitable activities for Wall Street, are now at least reduced and often totally gone,” said Dennis Kelleher, chief executive of Better Markets, one of the most vocal pro-regulatory reform groups. “They’ve had to exit hedge funds and private equity funds and they sold off any business with ‘proprietary trading’ on the door.”

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Those sales in part benefit smaller boutique investment banks not subject to the new rules as well as pure hedge fund and private equity firms that can snap up assets from the bigger players at low prices. It also means young talent now flows toward higher-paying private equity and hedge funds rather than the now more staid banks. Both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse in recent months pitched themselves by saying junior staff should no longer come to the office on Saturdays, a hallmark of the old Wall Street.

In fact, perhaps the clearest example of the transformation is Goldman, which on Thursday reported a 15 percent fourth-quarter drop in net revenue in its once dominant fixed income, currency and commodities business to $1.72 billion. For the year, Goldman earned a total of profit of $8.04 billion.

In 2007, at the height of the last Wall Street boom, Goldman’s trading wizards earned $4.89 billion in net revenue in the same business in the third quarter. And for the year in 2007, Goldman reported earnings of nearly $12 billion.

To be sure, some of the drop in trading and other revenue at big Wall Street banks reflects a slower economy and less risk-taking by corporate clients. But it also reflects the fact that under Dodd-Frank, the Volcker rule and new capital requirements instituted by the Federal Reserve and other regulators, Wall Street banks cannot trade for their own accounts the way they once did, must maintain much less risky balance sheets and for the most part can no longer sell exotic and high-return products such as collateralized debt or loan obligations.

The result of all this is that Wall Street is struggling to make money.

“There are only two banks beating their cost of capital right now, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs, and neither are beating it by much,” said Brad Hintz, a banking analyst at Sanford Bernstein and a former top executive at Morgan Stanley and Lehman Brothers. He was referring to how much it costs a bank to make money for shareholders. “New regulations are pushing down the performance of the banks. At some point they will get restructured, but right now they are in a major period of transition.”

Hintz pointed to Morgan Stanley’s current effort to sell off its commodities business as evidence of the deep transformation of Wall Street. Indeed, Morgan Stanley, under chief executive James Gorman, a veteran of Merrill Lynch’s giant brokerage business, is moving away from high-risk trading toward a much more stable asset management business.

The changes are not limited to Goldman and Morgan Stanley.

Citigroup has been selling off hedge fund and private equity assets to comply with the Volcker rule. Bank of America chief executive Brian Moynihan said last month that closing trading businesses banned under Volcker cost the bank $500 million in revenue per quarter.

None of these banks are going broke anytime soon, of course.

BofA reported earnings of $3.44 billion in the fourth quarter. JPMorgan earned $5.3 billion. But much of the gains are now coming from cost-cutting, including lowering salaries and bonuses, and from reducing reserves held for soured loans.

Because the economy is improving and consumers are in much better shape than they were five years ago, banks now have to keep less cash on hand to cushion against losses. Around 31 percent of JPMorgan’s profits in 2013, or $5.6 billion, came from reduced loan-loss reserves, according to Bloomberg.

Bank share prices have also done well since the depths of the crisis, but analysts note that much of that stems from reduced expenses as well as a general hope among investors that an improving economy will increase demand for loans and banking services, driving future profits.

Still, no one in the industry expects the kind of eye-popping returns that the largest banks earned in the run-up to the financial crisis. And the industry’s defenders say the public perception — that banks remain too big to fail and have not been reformed — is not at all fair.

“To say nothing has changed is just crazy talk,” said Tony Fratto, partner at Hamilton Place Strategies, a D.C. consulting firm working with banks on image repair. “There have been very significant changes. Banks raised lots of new capital, they face a host of new oversight powers and we are stress-testing them to the point that nothing else in the world will survive except these banks.”

Lobbyists for the big banks say they are now fighting just to avoid being broken up as vocal members of Congress, including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and David Vitter (R-La.), call for banks to be forced out of the investment banking business entirely.

“They will continue to hammer away at us no matter happens because it’s good politics,” said a top lobbyist for one of the largest banks in the U.S., who asked not to be identified by name so as not to raise the ire of regulators and members of Congress. “You look at all the changes we’ve made and the things we’ve done to reduce risk and improve our balance sheet and get rid of businesses, and you wonder what’s next. What’s the endgame?”

Fratto said there is now a “cottage industry” built up around ripping banks as too big to fail, and that is not likely to change anytime soon. “This is their theme song and they are going to continue to sing it as long as it still resonates with certain audiences,” he said.

For reformers, the test of whether regulatory changes are really working will not come until the next economic boom when banks may find new ways to get around the Volcker rule to trade for their own accounts or create even more exotic financial products not even dreamed of yet by current regulations.

“The greatest challenge for financial reform and the attempts to prevent another crash will be the economic cycle,” Kelleher said. “Memories tend to fade the further away we get from the last crisis.”

Staff writer Jon Prior contributed to this report.