Goldman had, for a time, the most badass leader on Wall Street in Hank Paulson. But Paulson is long gone.

Beyond generally seeming mealy-mouthed, the company's current CEO, Lloyd Blankfein, has of late been styling himself a little like Jamie Dimon, in particular in his late-to-the-game calls for compensation reform among the country's most overpaid paper-pushers.

But Dimon actually exudes real confidence instead of merely putting it on as a public-relations costume. Goldman's co-president, Jon Winkelried, recently resigned in the wake of a bailout by his company because he was somehow—and this is really just extraordinary—insolvent. This despite being paid more than $100 million over the past decade.

Goldman Sachs is no longer the Goldman Sachs of the financial world.

J.P. Morgan Chase is.But most tellingly, it used to be that at the scene of every Wall Street hit-and-run, people would whisper that Goldman had been seen driving away from the wreckage. When talking of the fall of the giant hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, Wall Streeters always talked about how Goldman pretended to want to save them only to end up trading against all of LTCM's positions.

But last fall, when Lehman Brothers failed and Merrill Lynch jumped into the arms of Bank of America, there was no talk of Goldman. Instead, everyone whispered about how J.P. Morgan and Jamie Dimon had been ruthless with both in terms of collateral calls, pushing both to the brink—actually, pushing Lehman over the brink—of insolvency. (J.P. Morgan, of course, denies that it was the proximate cause of any of this.)

"The way he is conducting himself while all these companies are in distress is shocking," one Wall Streeter told me at the time. "And he can't hide behind layers of management. At a time like that, there's no way, if you're going to do something that severe, that it comes from somebody other than him."

That Wall Streeter, mind you, was a partner at Goldman Sachs. Need I say more?