Imagine Jamie Dimon and Lloyd Blankfein arriving simultaneously at the door of a Congressional hearing room in Washington and insisting, with exquisite politeness, that the other precede him into the room.

That's roughly the spectacle on Wall Street this week, as everyone has been waiting for details on just how much the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase pocketed in bonuses for returning their respective firms to profitability and placing them at the top of the heap. Neither seems to want to be first to announce details of the compensation packages for themselves and their top bankers, although both banks are expected to report bonuses to the SEC within weeks.

Certainly, Dimon has everything to win by letting Blankfein blink first; while both firms have a lot to lose in the ongoing turmoil surrounding financial markets reform proposals, so far Goldman Sachs has attracted the lion's share of public opprobrium while JPMorgan has been left in peace to dramatically boost its market share and its clout.

Goldman Sachs will almost certainly pay far more in bonus payments than will JPMorgan Chase (the latest estimates peg it at around $480,000 per employee compared to $375,000 at JPMorgan Chase.) Both men passed on bonuses last year. In 2007, at the peak of the boom, Blankfein took home $68 million and Dimon received $28 million. But bonus payments and even profits aren't the whole story. What's more important is where those profits come from, and how vulnerable they are to vanishing in the wake of new government regulation.

For now, all the attention is on Goldman Sachs and its ability to emerge quickly and profitably from the crisis, including speculation surrounding a deal that enabled the firm to emerge without a loss from its exposure to the AIG crisis. And yet, two other deals struck by Jamie Dimon in the eye of the markets storm—the acquisition of Bear Stearns and Washington Mutual—have placed JPMorgan Chase in an even stronger position than Goldman Sachs, both financially and politically.

While Blankfein must continue to battle populist allegations that he is nothing more than a shameless opportunist working his Washington connections in exchange for special favors, Dimon has emerged as the de facto hero of Wall Street as a result of his willingness to take on the two failed firms. Ironically, even before the Obama administration announced it was declaring open season on the main sources of Goldman's profits—proprietary trading, principal investing, and hedge funds—it was clear that the firm that had reaped the biggest benefit from the crisis wasn't Goldman at all, but JPMorgan Chase.

While taking on Washington Mutual's assets and clients simply reinforced JPMorgan Chase's dominant share of the commercial banking market, the Bear Stearns acquisition solved a longstanding challenge, how to win the share of investment-banking revenues that the bank felt it deserved thanks to its size and its role as a key lender. A decade ago, in the wake of the merger that formed JPMorgan Chase, some of its bankers privately lamented the difficulties in battling bankers at Goldman, Morgan Stanley, and even the Citigroup complex (home to Salomon Smith Barney bankers) for mandates to underwrite equity issues for corporate clients. Even in 2005, JPMorgan Chase ranked a measly fifth in the stock underwriting league tables both within the United States and globally.

By 2009, according to data from Dealogic, that picture had changed. Thanks to the bargain-priced purchase of Bear Stearns at the beginning of the crisis, JPMorgan's share of the market nearly trebled at home to hit 18.4 percent. It was the top-ranked global stock underwriter not only at home but also globally, where it commanded a 11.8 percent market share. Goldman, once unbeatable by anyone other than Morgan Stanley, was relegated firmly to second place.

JPMorgan Chase had always been a bigger player in the debt-underwriting markets than Goldman. But now, while Goldman's market share remained unchanged, that of the big bank jumped by nearly a third. Overall, Dealogic calculates that JPMorgan Chase's share of investment-banking revenues jumped 25 percent to 9.3 percent of the total market between 2005 and 2008. Goldman is up about 15 percent, to 6.9 percent. Only in the merger-advisory business had Goldman hung on to its lead, albeit by a slimmer margin.

Goldman Sachs may be raking in the profits from its trading and other businesses, but profits—especially at a time of populist outrage against Wall Street—are no longer the only determinant of lasting success. "Where you stand in these core businesses is important, and now JPMorgan can beat and is beating Goldman at its own game," says Richard Bove, a veteran analyst of banking and investment-banking stocks for Rochdale Securities.