So far this is just a civil suit filed by the SEC against Goldman. Goldman will probably not contest the charges, simply pay the gazillion dollar fine and move on. It's happened this way before with some of the big guns.

The wait is to see if the Justice Department will follow up with criminal fraud charges, which is what it should have been in the first place, imo. That's another story and with so many ex Goldman guys in position of influence, as well as the big bank lobbying efforts, I'm not holding my breath.

I've wondered where the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, which includes Manhattan, the attorney general of New York State, even the NYC district attorney have been in all this. I thought by now they would have started something against Wall Street, but then I'm reminded how important Wall Street is to the tax base of the city and the state. They don't want to upset this relationship.

Some of the big brokerages and financial institutions have threatened in the past to leave NYC if the local pols got to aggressive with them. To lose even a small portion of the huge amount of taxes they funnel into the city and state, which is already occurring due to the recession, causes great revenue distress to the city and state. They don't need to do anything that might make this worse.

So it just might be that the New York legal people are tiptoeing lightly around all this waiting to see which way the feds are going to go. Whether New York takes any action at all against the big institutions like Goldman remains to be seen. If they do, my guess is it will be isolated yet politically positive. Quite a challenge.