Europe has hesitated more than the United States to subject its banks to measures like stress tests because of an entrenched belief that it would be better to wait for the market to recover and for the bad assets that banks still hold to pickup on value.
The idea is to get presence and scale, and pickup a lot of lesser-value sales, somewhat the way Google makes billions based on very small transactions.
Goldman is accused of misleading investors because it allegedly didn't let investors know that a hedge fund which was betting that sub-prime mortgages would fall in value was helping to pick the securities that made up the portfolio.
So long-bond buyers in today's market run the risk of purchasing something that is extremely likely to lose value while gaining nothing or next to nothing in yield pick-up.
"The challenge now is to pickup the new role, which has not been defined adequately as yet, and to make sure I add value to the work of the police and the work of crime reduction, " he told BBC Wales.