i think a top to the point where you should buy MER and C and short GS [i'm such a contrarian, that opposes conventional wisdom entirely].
Hank stole a printing press from Ben and lent it to Goldman Sachs. There is a reason why GS had a blowout quarter while every other financial crashed hard: fraud or they are really just that good.
Maybe they just realised real estate/subprime was a disaster waiting to happen? This required no special genius - half of ET was proclaiming for the last 2 years that real estate would have a historic bear market. The real question is how come the rest of the street got caught so badly. The answer is that they are run by managers & office politicians, not traders (who have mostly left to form hedge funds if they are any good).
LOL, you are a very funny dude. So you are saying ET guys knew it all along and those stupid wall street traders had no clue about all this mess? And also, you mean, now there are only dumb traders left in the banks as all the good ones left to start hedge funds? Gee, you must really be trading out of some small village in the midwest or other country side. Well, I prefer to be considered dumb but rather camp with the bank traders than with the "experts" at ET.