Wall Street looks the same: the same sharp-suited brokers swinging the same monogrammed attaché cases; the blue-jacketed traders smoking and gossiping outside the Stock Exchange; the same air of ambient wealth, gambling and nervous expectation.

Yet Wall Street has changed for ever, and everyone on it knows.

After the financial upheavals of the past few weeks, the voting-down of the bailout in Washington, the precipitous fall of the Dow on Monday, the landscape of the famous street looks very different. Yesterday a bulldozer was digging a large hole in front of the New York Stock Exchange: inside, the Earth has moved, too.

The change is partly structural, partly political and partly cultural. The five great investments banks that dominated Wall Street, and world finance, are no more: two have failed, one is selling up to Bank of America, and the others have become commercial banks. The era of the self-regarding, massively self-rewarding independent investment banker, the financial colossus of the past few years, is over. “The world has changed,” a spokesman for Morgan Stanley declared last week. It is, William Isaac, former chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, which helps to guarantee bank deposits, said, “the end of Wall Street as we have known it”.

The centre of financial gravity has abruptly shifted to Washington. It is the legislators who now hold America’s financial future in their hands. Those “Masters of the Universe” Tom Wolfe wrote about in Bonfire of the Vanities are now not even masters of Wall Street. Regulators are poised to bring the wild boys of the financial world to book, and to keep them reined in; the American public is determined that someone be made to pay.

But it may be the cultural shift that is most profound, and least easy to see. “Wall Street: RIP,” pronounced The New York Times last weekend. “A world of big egos. A world where people love to roll the dice with borrowed money, of tightwire trading, propelled by computers... that world is largely coming to an end.”

You could see the change in the taut faces of the workers filing into the Stock Exchange yesterday morning: they might have been lining up for a particularly gruelling and unpredictable exam. Most declined to speak.

The shift showed in little ways: at a coffee shop around the corner, one woman complained that her morning bagel was 20 cents more expensive than the day before. “It went up today? Already?” she exclaimed. “Bear Stearns, AIG, now my bagel . . .” she grumbled, a litany of economic woe.

Outside the shop, Rosario Catania was panhandling: “Done better then I expected,” he said. “Numbers went down 700 yesterday, but picked up again this morning.” On Wall Street, even the beggars are speculators.

Andrew Schlieman was walking an impossibly tiny dog, Kingston, outside the exchange. “I got out two years ago,” he said. “What's happening is the opposite of irrational exuberance. It’s the downside of capitalism, the opportunism and greed. It’s the American way. Gordon Gekko said it best, ‘Greed is good’,” a reference to the character played by Michael Douglas in the film Wall Street, which showed the street’s excesses at their most lurid, and most attractive.

For the past two decades the Gordon Gekkos have been envied and criticised, but often secretly admired, by the rest of America. Today they are loathed and vilified to a depth and with an intensity that has not been felt for 80 years. That fury vented itself, via Congress, with the rejection of the bailout Bill on Monday. Even if it hurts them, Americans want to hurt the people who got rich and made America ill on toxic credit.

“This is the most lucrative business on the planet, but there’s a right way to do it and wrong way,” Jim Foster, a broker at Gotham Realty Holdings, said. “The market will come back - in three, maybe four years . . .” That sentiment was widely expressed by Wall Street workers yesterday, but without the optimism and conviction that is characteristic of Wall Street, and vital to its success.

That is what has changed most fundamentally. The writer and economist John Kenneth Galbraith identified the essential ingredient of financial feel-good: “Speculation on a large scale requires a pervasive sense of confidence and optimism and conviction that ordinary people were meant to be rich . . . Such a feeling of trust is essential for a boom. When people are cautious, questioning, misanthropic, suspicious, or mean, they are immune to speculative enthusiasms.”

Enthusiasm was gone from Wall Street yesterday, replaced by a febrile uncertainty and a foreboding that 2008 might turn into 1929. Most economists do not believe that a Thirties-style Depression is in the offing. America’s irrepressible financial gamblers will find another way to make quick, huge money, and buy a bigger yacht. The earth will stop moving under Wall Street, and the bulldozer will leave. But as the tourists, brokers and traders look up at the ledges high above Wall Street, they are all wondering the same thing.

In fact there were only two suicide jumps related to the Crash of 1929 and tales of mass suicide became fact, based on rumour, fear and uncertainty. That, as the world has just seen, is how Wall Street works.

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