According to an article in Crain's New York Business, there are a few green shoots on Wall Street, and possibly the beginning of some manner of Wall Street 2.0. Maybe. But my worry is that what is being observed is not a totally new operating system (to stay with the computer metaphor), which is what's needed, so much as an update downloaded to fix a few bugs. I.e., that things will pretty much be "business as usual," which is not good necessarily very good for the middle class, but will, of course, be great for the very wealthy.
What is more, many of the same people who got us into this mess are still at the helms of big ships, and they're not telling everything that their TARP money is being used for. That doesn't sound very "2.0" to me.
From the article:
Don't look now, but amid the darkest times to hit Wall Street in nearly 80 years there are stirrings of life. As the new Obama administration races to repair the shattered banking system, investors are beginning to place their bets. They are abandoning big banks and instead placing their chips on a group of financial institutions whose survival seemed very much in doubt last autumn....
What will Wall Street 2.0 look like, I wonder, when it does emerge?
(An aside: there are some interesting ideas in other articles of the current issue of Crain's. One that caught my eye in the print version of Crain's that I think might be particularly viable is to offer tax breaks for the video game industry, which is huge and is growing still. In the dot-com days, there was a "Silicon Alley" in Manhattan. I think more tech-related jobs in NYC would be great. We certainly need to try to not put so many eggs in the financial services basket. And certainly now's the time for such companies to consider starting up here: commercial vacancy rates are way up and rents way down.)