Economists for Merrill Lynch estimate the new Social Security investment option would send $54 billion annually gushing into the markets. That could create a bonanza of new customers, sales commissions, management fees and cross-marketing opportunities for financial management firms.

But Wall Street has been surprisingly silent as Bush crosses the nation stumping for the change and as lawmakers consider legislation. Some figure it is because the industry doesn't want to blow chances of passage by rallying for the privatization proposal, giving powerful opponents such as the AFL-CIO and AARP more ammunition to claim it is a sweetheart deal for big business.

"Right now, it's clearly in Wall Street's best interest to say nothing," said University of Chicago economics professor Austan Goolsbee.. Fees from the new accounts "would be the largest windfall gain in American financial history," he declared in an article he published last year on the impact of Social Security privatization to the financial management industry.

That contention is hotly disputed by the Securities Industry Association (SIA), which released its own study in response to Goolsbee's research that found managing the low-balance Social Security investment accounts would yield only 1.2 percent of the industry's total annual revenue.

"What the industry will benefit from this is off-topic," said Dan Michaelis, spokesman for the lobbying group representing 43 major financial firms. "We support reform because we truly believe it's important to the long-term economic health of the country."

The silence of some major players on Wall Street toward the plan is mainly because "we are really at the very beginning of this, it's a very diverse industry and we want to see exactly where it goes," he said.

The SIA, business groups and financial firms which support private accounts as part of the Alliance for Worker Retirement Security coalition spent nearly $108 million lobbying on Capitol Hill during 2003 and the first half of 2004, plus donated $34.6 million to federal candidates and political parties since 1999, according to the non-partisan Center for Responsive Politics.

Financial industry political action committees (PACs) also have been a major source of cash to the re-election coffers of all of Utah's federal lawmakers.

Republican Sen. Bob Bennett, a senior member of the Senate Banking and Joint Economic committees, received $2.3 million for his 2004 re-election campaign from PACs affiliated with the finance and insurance industry. The most he had received from finance industry PACs in previous fund-raising cycles was $286,000 in 1998, according to Federal Election Commission records tabulated by the non-partisan data service PoliticalMoneyLine.

Second District Rep. Jim Matheson, a Democrat, sits on the House Financial Services Committee and raked in $1.6 million from finance and insurance industry PACs for his 2004 re-election campaign, compared to $61,000 in 2002 and $13,500 in 2000 from such PACs.

However, Bennett and Matheson could not be further apart on the issue of investing Social Security taxes in the private financial market.

Bennett is one of Bush's point people in the Senate push for private accounts, having chaired numerous hearings on Social Security while heading the Joint Economic Committee, and is a potential architect of reform legislation.

"The impact of this would not be a windfall for [the finance industry] because as the president indicated, the transaction fees would be negotiated by Congress so Wall Street would not make a lot of money on this," said Bennett, whose annual conference on financial services has featured such big guns as Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, former Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt and former New York Stock Exchange CEO Richard Grasso.

Meanwhile, Matheson's criticism of Bush's Social Security privatization plan has been a rare departure for the lawmaker considered one of the "least loyal" Democrats in the House for his frequent votes in favor of the president's initiatives. He says the claim in Bush's State of the Union speech that Social Security will go bankrupt is "based on an incredibly pessimistic view of economic growth." Diverting taxes away from the Social Security trust fund does nothing to guarantee the system's solvency and "no one has articulated to me how moving to private accounts helps widows and children" receiving Social Security, he said.

Matheson's biggest PAC contributions come from organized labor, which opposes Bush's plan. He says he doesn't know whether private investment options will be a boon to the securities industry.

"I'm all for trying to create greater savings and economic growth in this country, but we need to define the degree that we truly have a problem with Social Security before we come up with solutions," he said.