Wall Street may have one last party, and it could come at the expense of its hometown and home state getting their houses in order.

New York could better get on with life if President Obama and Congress would figure out how they’re going to approach the two most important aspects of financial regulation, and soon.

A big risk to New York City and State could be a mini-Wall-Street boom over the next few months, maybe even a year.

Yes, it sounds strange to make this point when the stock market was down by triple digits yesterday and may be on its way there today.

But the stock market isn’t a direct indicator of the financial industry’s performance.

Since January, surviving Wall Street firms and their commercial-bank brethren have been raking in big profits, possibly even record profit increases for the quarter that ended last week.

How? Financial firms are taking advantage of cheap money. The Federal Reserve is trying to keep rates near zero. Further, potential investors know that if a financial firm runs into (more) trouble, the feds will bail its lenders out.

So the firms have cash to make profits in particularly volatile markets, like foreign currencies, bonds, and commodities.

Goldman Sachs is betting lots of money and its lenders’ money here. Morgan Stanley is taking less risk, trying to fulfill its pledge last year to, well, take less risk, but it doubtless feels the pressure. Citigroup and friends don’t want to be left behind.

The best evidence yet is what the FT has been reporting all week: some houses are back to fiddling with securitization in order to avoid capital requirements — that is, regulatory requirements to hold aside some non-borrowed money to absorb possible losses.

Financial firms can hold less capital against certain securitized assets, particularly those structured to garner triple-A ratings.

Bankers structured many of their bubble-era investments into securitized debt because it allowed them to make higher profits per dollar invested. But it also leaves less cushion for losses before a firm finds itself insolvent.

It’s complicated — of course — but Goldman and Barclays, which bought some of Lehman Brothers, are “inventing schemes to reduce the capital cost of the risky assets on banks’ balance sheets, in the latest sign that financial market innovation is far from dead,” the FT observes.

The investment banks are working on pooling many clients’ existing loans into new securities with different levels of risk. “The goal would be … to reduce the capital that would need to be held against the assets,” the paper notes.

With securitization as it relates to credit-card debt, too, financial firms are doing something disturbing.

Remember when nobody wanted to buy securitized mortgage-backed debt in late 2006 and 2007, so the banks started piling it on their own books?

Well, now, nobody wants to buy securitized credit-card debt, at least not without hefty protection. So the banks, to entice investors worried that something will go wrong, are using their own books to take the most risk here, so that the outside purchasers of the securities can take less risk.

“In an unusual move, banks such as Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America have come to the rescue of the off-balance-sheet vehicles that help them to fund credit card loans,” the FT reports.

The banks’ strategy is worrisome. (It also reminds FW, unfortunately, of what banks tried to do in October 2007, unsuccessfully, with their mortgage-related securities.)

What does this mean for New York?

In New York City, personal-income tax collections were down 17 percent last year, and the city expects them to fall another 20 percent — at least — this year.

As my colleague E.J. McMahon noted yesterday at City Journal‘s conference on Tomorrow’s New York, things are even worse at the state level.

Here’s the risk: it’s quite conceivable that New York could see a mini-spike in these revenues, albeit from low levels, as the year progresses.

Financial firms are scrambling to pay workers like it was 2006 so that they don’t defect to rivals who are offering “golden ‘hello’s.”

Even without such a spike, New York’s pols could soon be reading headlines about record financial-firm profits, and not know whether to be outraged or thrilled.

For budget purposes, they’ll pick thrilled.

Albany and City Hall have done everything possible in the past 18 months to avoid dealing with their structural budget challenges — unaffordable pensions, healthcare, and everything else.

They’re not going to need much evidence that everything is A-OK to abandon any pretense of fiscal reason.

But then what? It can’t last.

It may have peaked before the pols even noticed it.

If bond-market investors think that President Obama and Congress are going to do a new stimulus to top the old one, they may spook on inflation fears. Treasury bond interest rates would soar — along with all other interest rates, despite the Fed’s efforts.

In such a case, New York would be even worse off than it is now. It would have wasted more time and perhaps made things worse, and it would have a harder time borrowing for its own capital needs.

So what should Obama and Congress do?

First, they should figure out what they’re going to do about the “too big to fail” problem for financial firms, which is still powering New York’s economy.

Second, they should impose real, uniform capital requirements on these firms; investments — requirements that can’t be gamed with securitization.

Financial firms should have to hold a certain percentage of non-borrowed money against all assets to absorb losses, and that’s that — no special treatment for structured finance.

If there’s one thing we should have learned from the past two years, it’s that financial firms and regulators sometimes aren’t good judges of what’s risky and what’s not. Capital requirements should not depend on their misjudgments. Securitization should stand on its own merits, not on regulatory favor.

Unfortunately, Obama’s White Paper on financial regulation is inconsistent, at best, on “too big to fail.” It punts on capital requirements completely, saying that the government will think about it in December.

New York should not enjoy its mini-party too much — because either the government or the market is going to stop it.

If it’s the latter, it will be worse.