The move by Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley to become bank holding companies says a lot about who may emerge as winners when the dust settles from this mother of all storms.

As analyst Richard Bove pointed out in a note over the weekend, several of the commercial banks, including U.S. Bancorp, Wells Fargo, PNC Financial, and JPMorgan Chase, traded at or near 52-week highs during the past seven days, a testament to the attractiveness of the commercial bank model in our timid new world. Simply put, banks can collect cash, in the form of deposits, and cash is king.

As straightforward as that sounds, the shift is nonetheless breathtaking. After decades of the commercial banks peering longingly over their teller windows at the profits being earned in investment banking, envying the Wall Street firms’ agility and ability to take on risky but highly lucrative trades, they finally were admitted to those hallowed premises by the passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act in 1999. Now, it appears that they may have been better off never crossing that barrier.

The depository institutions are not the only entities to emerge from the tumult looking relatively healthy — and I did say relatively. Indeed, identifying the latest crop of winners and losers might lend some perspective to the chaotic events of the last few days.

Here is my take:

The biggest personal loser has to be Richard Fuld, the chief executive of now-bankrupt Lehman Brothers. The Fed decided to bail out virtually every other sizeable financial institution in America, but somehow left Lehman off the list. He must be wondering — wrong zip code? Bad tie choice? The latest moves taken to calm the chaos-banning short selling — arranging a buyer of last resort for mortgage-backed paper — came a few days too late for Mr. Fuld, whose firm is being parceled into desirable bite-size pieces and gobbled up at fire-sale prices.

The biggest winner is John Mack, chief executive of Morgan Stanley, whose firm was ascending the stairs to the guillotine at this time last week. In a deal announced yesterday, the firm agreed to sell a 20% stake to Mitsubishi. The price was set at book value as of the end of August, or $31.75. Not bad for a stock that traded down to $11.70 last Thursday.

Earlier, the stock had traded higher amid speculation that a buyout or combination with Wachovia was in prospect. Wachovia? Normally, a company sitting on $122 billion of option-adjustable rate mortgages, which it acquired in 2006 as part of its takeover of Golden West Financial, would not seem to be the ideal merger partner for a company burdened with mortgage-related credits. That’s like gymnast Shawn Johnson drawing Yao Ming for a one-legged race.

Which leads to last week’s biggest corporate winner: Barclays. Playing brinkmanship with Lehman’s management and pulling out of takeover talks two weeks ago proved invaluable. Barclays now has the chance to buy Lehman’s capital markets businesses, unfettered by bad debts, which is certainly what it wanted to do all along. Reportedly, Barclays is paying around $250 million for a first-rate investment banking presence, complete with some 9,000 employees in America. The combination, as noted above, is especially appealing since it combines Lehman’s know-how and reputation with a deposit base. That’s a home run.

Other than Lehman, Merrill Lynch emerges from the chaos as the biggest corporate loser. This once-great firm is now likely to disappear into Bank of America, a company created from its 1998 merger with NationsBank. Though a combination with Merrill would make it the country’s largest financial institution in terms of assets, industry observers expect a distinct culture clash. It is hard to imagine that Bank of America, already struggling with Countrywide, which it bought earlier this year, will allow Merrill to aggressively build its investment banking franchise.

Regulators, too, have had their ups and downs these past few weeks. Few would argue that Securities and Exchange chairman Christopher Cox is emerging as Washington’s biggest loser. The SEC’s management of short sellers has been clumsy in the extreme. Many feel that removing the uptick rule last year was a big mistake, which was then compounded more recently by the removal of temporary measures aimed at preventing naked short selling.

The most recent heavy-handed response — banning all short selling for 799 financial stocks — was poorly executed. Hours after the announcement, it turned out that the list of companies was based on SIC codes, and omitted many large financial stocks, including GE, Capital One, and American Express. The list also left off the real estate investment trusts, and it included — idiotically — HMOs.

The winning regulator is James Lockhart, head of the newly created Federal Housing Finance Agency, responsible for managing the $5.4 trillion (and growing) of mortgage-backed securities held by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Lost in the shuffle is the fact that Mr. Lockhart was actually overseeing those same entities as head of the Office of Federal Housing Enterprise during the period when the agencies’ portfolios blossomed with worthless paper. While the chief executives of Freddie and Fannie are on their way out of town, Mr. Lockhart is sitting pretty.

Hedge funds certainly look like losers today. After pressing the stock exchanges and legislators for favorable treatment on key regulatory issues — such as eliminating the uptick rule, for instance — they appear to be no longer in the driver’s seat. The ban on selling short financial stocks, as messy as it was, could be viewed as a curtain falling on the halcyon days for the industry. More fundamental to their outlook is the likely reduction in available leverage with which to inflate results. Though using borrowings to increase returns is a time-tested strategy, it turns lethal in inept hands, or during turbulent markets.

Don’t count out the hedge funds completely, however. Doubtless this period will sort out the truly inventive investors from the wannabe’s, reasonably shrinking the number of funds. As we speak, hedge fund investors are combing through the ashes, buying up assets on the cheap. And there are plenty of those.

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