> As panic paralyzed the financial system in September 2008, the government, with a stroke of the pen, allowed Goldman and Morgan Stanley to change their statuses from vulnerable, stand-alone Wall Street firms to regulated banks operating within the taxpayer safety net.

This sentence confuses me. I did not know that becoming a bank holding company required prior federal permission. I thought it was a regulated state that any financial institution could elect into. I thought Goldman and other investment banks had avoided it previously because the regs cramped their style.

I also don't see how that places them within a taxpayer safety net. The two biggest bank "safety nets" I can think of are the Federal Reserve discount window and the FDIC. Neither spend taxpayer money; they are both self-funding.