Goldman gets a $550 million dollar fine for misrepresenting tranches of subprime fail as something other than an investment in horse manure, which sounds big in theory, but in practice, it’s only the equivalent of their two-week paycheck:

Goldman earned $3.84 billion in the quarter, atop a staggering $12.78 billion in revenues. By that measure, the fine amounts to nearly 15 days of earnings in the first three months of the year….A colleague pointed out that we should use only days on which the market was open for our calculations. That means the Goldman fine amounts to about 10.2 days of earnings, based on its first-quarter results.

As they say, folks — if you can afford it, it’s not a problem, it’s an expense. Natch, there will also be a small volley of client lawsuits to withstand, but this was the biggest specter over their stock, from what I could surmise.

But for those disappointed, at least there is one call for some more interesting action: Christopher Whalen says $GS should clean house, find themselves a nice i-banker to balance out all those trader-bots. (Sharks are a natural predator of squid, so perhaps it makes sense.)