And then there were...none

If this has already been posted tonight, kindly point me to it.

This CNN article came out around 9:45pm PDT 9/21/08; emphases mine:

New World on Wall Street

Excerpts:

Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to face more oversight from the Federal Reserve. Change provides more funding and opens door to more mergers.

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- And then there were none.

Federal regulators converted Wall Street's remaining stand-alone investment banks - Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley - into bank holding companies Sunday night.

The move allows Goldman and Morgan to scoop up retail banks and to streamline their borrowing from the Federal Reserve. The shift also is aimed at removing them as targets of nervous investors and customers, who brought down their former rivals Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch this year.

But it also puts Goldman and Morgan under the Fed's supervision, increasing the agency's regulatory oversight and possibly forcing them to raise additional capital.

And it brings to a close the era of the Wall Street investment bank, a storied institution that traded stocks and bonds, advised mergers and showered lavish bonuses on its executives.

"The separation of investment banking and commercial banking has come to an end," said Bert Ely, an independent banking consultant.

(...)

Morgan (MS, Fortune 500) and Goldman (GS, Fortune 500), whose shares plummeted last week before the $700 billion bailout was unveiled, will likely avoid those fates with the conversion, experts said.

"They were afraid they'd get killed if they didn't [convert]," said Christopher Whalen, managing director of Institutional Risk Analytics. "The Fed is scrambling to take the remaining targets off the radar."

The duo is expected to quickly add to their tiny existing retail banking divisions, which will give them access to a cheaper and more stable source of funding - customer deposits - rather than the volatile short-term funding they rely on. The companies, which both requested the conversion, signaled as much in separate press releases Sunday.

They have plenty to pick from now that the credit crisis has devastated the banking sector.

(...)

With $20 billion in deposits, Goldman said it plans to grow its deposit base through acquisitions and internally.

(...)

The action also solidifies their standing with the Fed. While the investment banks received emergency access to the Fed funding in the wake of Bear Stearns' demise in March, Goldman and Morgan will now have all the same privileges at the Fed lending window as their banking peers.

As part of Sunday's move, the Fed extended additional credit to Goldman and Morgan, as well as Merrill, allowing them to pledge a wider array of collateral.

(...)

All eyes now turn to the troubled traditional banks, such as Washington Mutual (WM, Fortune 500) and Wachovia, which are scrambling to shore up their books as lending has frozen up and investor confidence has sunk.

And at 10:45pm PDT, this Bloomberg article came out: Goldman, Morgan Stanley Bring Down Curtain on Wall Street Era -- Excerpt:

Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- The Wall Street that shaped the financial world for two decades ended last night, when Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley concluded there is no future in remaining investment banks now that investors have determined the model is broken.

The Federal Reserve's approval of their bid to become banks ends the ascendancy of the securities firms, 75 years after Congress separated them from deposit-taking lenders, and caps weeks of chaos that sent Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. into bankruptcy and led to the rushed sale of Merrill Lynch & Co. to Bank of America Corp.

``The decision marks the end of Wall Street as we have known it,'' said William Isaac, a former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. ``It's too bad.''