After Meltdown, 'Safe Will Be the New Sexy': Cramer

A new era has arrived on Wall Street, with the big investment firms falling, James Cramer writes in New York, and traditional banks with large deposit bases looking like the smartest option all along. “We’ll see a more chaste culture emerge from all of this, on Wall Street, and perhaps beyond,” he writes. “Caution will be the new daring. Safe will be the new sexy.”

Both the regulators and the ratings agencies blew it, says Cramer, and insurers like AIG didn't have the reserves available to bail out everyone at once. With Wall Street’s greed-is-good era over, “the winners will be those banks that… have an old-school deposit component at their core,” Cramer writes. “Their owners and operators may not make as much money… but at the end of the day they get to keep their jobs. And they’re still the richest men in town.” (More Jim Cramer stories.)