[pwncat]

Not remotely, but they're pretty scummy, like the investment banking industry as a whole. What makes them worse than most others is their connection to politics, which allows them to get all kinds of favors.

If you want to develop a boiling hatred of the investment banking industry, look into how these firms handle IPOs. If the banks were behaving ethically, IPOs would be priced at the company's fair value, meaning that having an allocation in the IPO would have zero expectation. In practice, IPOs are known to be 10-15% underpriced, meaning that the IPOing firm raises less money than it should, while the bank has a positive-expectation allocation it can use to pay favors to clients. Moreover, it's a bad idea for an average Joe to participate in IPOs at all; if you're a nobody, banks will let you in on losing IPOs but never allocate you into the good ones.

Another sad truth is that the "nice" (in relative terms) investment banks were Lehman and Bear, both of which died. Lehman especially was known for having less of a BSD (not the OS) culture than the other banks. It was also obvious even in late 2007 that these banks would be the first to fail (if nothing else, because they were less prestigious and would be hit first by panic-driven activities) while Goldman had enough of a lifeline to benefit from the inevitable "stop the bleeding" measures for which other banks would be too late.