Goldman, Guard Your People

Benjamin Pace, U.S. CIO of Deutsche Bank Private Wealth Management, believes the traditional investment bankers will stick around because their services will be more in demand than ever. It's the traders who he believes will be the most likely to disappear.

"I'm talking about the best and brightest who come out of our engineering schools," Pace says. "They weren't going to work for Cisco [Systems] (CSCO Quote) and Microsoft (MSFT Quote) anymore, they were going to work for Goldman Sachs."

But Goldman's genius appears to come from its ability to win advisory assignments through its investment bankers, which gives them access to information and capital its traders can put to work. Without those two things working together, there would appear to be little difference between Goldman and Lazard -- except about $20 billion in market cap.

The gap is still large, but it has narrowed considerably over the last two-and-a-half months.