Whether you call it the Crash of 2008, a market panic, or a meltdown, the fast-moving events of the last several weeks have been hard to summarize as Wall Street got buried and restructured.

The global markets were trashed by Friday, Oct. 10. By the end of that week—the worst ever for the stock market—the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged from 10,000 to as low as 8,451.19, and paper losses for all U.S. stocks from last year's high point totaled $8.4 trillion, according to most estimates.

In the preceding weeks, Lehman went belly up with British bank Barclays picking over the remains; Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch; and Citigroup made a play for Wachovia only to get upstaged by Wells Fargo. But that show isn't over yet with Citigroup getting litigious with Wachovia's preferred suitor.

Main Street was pointing the finger at Wall Street, blaming "greedy" investment bankers and their top management for the staggering losses. Regulators, Congress, the Bush administration and the regular people all across America who were defaulting and losing their homes to foreclosure also shared in the blame game.

Through all the drama, came a historic reshaping of the brokerage industry. Even those who have been in the business for decades and witnessed previous economic downturns were astounded. Tom James, chairman of Raymond James Financial, says, "it's catastrophic, what's happened to the face of the industry."

James blames poor management at the troubled firms for their problems and says it also contributed to the larger economic fiasco. "The public has a right to be mad," James told his advisors. "There are tremendous losses all across the world to investors, not just losses of fat cats on Wall Street." He railed against what happened to Lehman, saying, "I think Lehman tried very hard, but we never got the straight story on valuation." Wachovia didn't pay enough attention to its due diligence when it bought Golden West with its problematic loans. Wachovia, he says, was "too optimistic in its assumptions. The part it fell down on was the mortgages."

When James spoke, the $700 billion financial rescue plan was in danger of not passing and he was frustrated with the way Congress was handling the situation. "This is one of those rare times when a free enterpriser like me believes [the government] needs to intervene."

And intervene it did. Not just the Treasury Department, the Federal Reserve and Congress in the United States, but also the British government and the European Union. The march toward liquidity finally started but with a lot of critics crying socialism.

Despite the wild swings and the Dow's nosedive, day after day, the beginnings of a turnaround finally came as mid-October approached. At press time, the U.S. government, which also bailed out mortgage giants Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, as well as the world's largest insurer, AIG, was getting ready to buy stakes in the country's nine biggest banks: Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch (even though it's being acquired), Wells Fargo and State Street Corp. But as the government sets out to right the financial system, the travails of the wirehouses have been set in stone. And, those problems are translating into an opportunity for their smaller competitors.

"Overall we believe that wealth management is going to come out a lot stronger than lots of other parts of the financial services area," says Sean Cunniff, research director of the brokerage and wealth management service of Needham, Mass.-based TowerGroup. "There's still a lot of wealth here and abroad."

But Cunniff and TowerGroup also believe that there is going to be continued upheaval in the industry. "We don't think we've seen the end of the mergers and acquisitions of the brokerage firms." At the same time, the best advisors have nothing to fear. "If you are a good advisor or advisory team, you're going to have a lot of opportunities to change employers."

That's what Dennis Zank, president of Raymond James & Associates is hoping. He recently told a banquet room full of his women advisors at the beginning of October as the markets were plunging: "This thing is going to turn around and it's going to be unbelievable when it does." Still, he warned, "it's going to take time to get through this process."