Everyone get ready to cry a big river for Wall Street fat cats, because their lives have just not been the same since mean old Barack Obama took office and started regulating their playground.

Via New York Magazine, a tale of woe and regret, tinged with more than a little bitterness:

To comply with the looming regulations, banks have begun stripping themselves of the pistons that powered their profits: leverage and proprietary trading. In the wake of the crash, Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs converted to bank holding companies to tap the “discount window,” the Fed’s pipeline of cheap funds that gave the banks an emergency source of liquidity. That move seemed smart then, but the stricter standards required of banks have now left them boxed in.

With all the major banks unable to wager their own funds on big bets, there’s a growing sense that the money that was being made during the Bush boom won’t be back. “The government has strangled the financial system,” banking analyst Dick Bove told me recently. “We’ve basically castrated these companies. They can’t borrow as much as they used to borrow.”

Dawwww. Poor babies. Do you have the sense that they still aren't living in reality? You'd be right. They're not.

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