Goldman Sachs has no doubt borne the brunt of the public backlash against too big to fail banks. Rightly or wrongly.

The outrage over compensation always comes back to Goldman. And now the Volcker Rule seems disproportionately aimed at the venerable bank and its lucrative proprietary trading operations.

With that in mind, the bank is understandably mulling ways to defend itself.

One idea floated in a Reuters article is for Goldman to take itself private. (A similar rumor circulated right after Lehman Brothers collapsed and many thought Goldman would be a target of short sellers.) 

Reuters blows off the idea largely: "But going private is not as easy as it sounds. It would make it more difficult for the firm to raise capital and would reduce its access to liquidity."

I would go a little further than that, though. It would be pretty darned expensive to do so. The bank currently has a market cap over $75 billion and is majority owned by institutional investors. It would take a hefty premium to go private.

Plus, I'm not aware of any private banks even remotely of Goldman's size. When the bank went public in 1999, it had roughly $60 billion in assets. Now? More than $880 billion.

I'd reckon that going private would require the bank to shed some of those assets. Think of it as a self-imposed Volcker Rule.

Additionally, one of the big reasons that prompted Goldman to go public in the first place was compensation. Not only could the bank reward employees with stock, but it allowed partners to cash out. If some employees aren't thrilled about being paid in stock that they have to wait a few years to cash in, how are shares in a private company going to rectify that?

So, in short, going private is the answer to neither the Volcker Rule nor the compensation issue. Rather, the bank should hope to negotiate its way back to the public investment bank model that largely kept it out of the Federal Reserve's jurisdiction. Maybe that will be part of a Geithner Rule.