[ by Melanie Gretchen ]

Is Wall Street a brave new world?

Wall Street thinks so.

Here what's changed since 2008:

• Regulators are now doing their best to make up for having given banks free rein in the period that led up to the financial crisis
• Banks are required to (i) hold more capital, (ii) boost the amount of cash they’ve got available for unforeseen market blowups, and (iii) test the vulnerability of their businesses to events beyond their control
• Banks' risk cultures and internal controls: all of the biggest banks have spent significant money on sprucing up systems to deliver the kind of data and analysis that Fed stress tests require.

However, banks say they’re going beyond the Federal Reserve's mandates and have dramatically increased their own stress testing.  CNBC investigated this truth via a poll of a couple dozen equity analysts who cover Bank of America, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, and Morgan Stanley to see how Wall Street is doing since the financial crisis.

Success? The firms were judged by 5 factors to rate on how these companies manage risk.  CNBC received comprehensive answers from a third of them.

The 5 factors:

• the strength of their risk culture
• whether they hold their traders to strict trading limits
• how good they are at managing their own complexity and business focus
• the strength of their capital ratios
• their liquidity.

For further details, go to [CNBC, 10/9/12].