The era of unregulated investment banking ended yesterday when the nation’s last two big investment banks, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs, opted to change their status to bank holding companies and become regulated by the Fed. Like participants in a shotgun marriage, their actions were not entirely voluntary. In the face of the mortgage meltdown and a major retreat on Wall Street, investment capital, the mother's milk of investment banking, simply dried up, requiring bankers to seek capital from the general public.[here]