Secret tapes made by a banking investigator examining Goldman Sachs show a culture of deference and risk aversion in which regulators were afraid to anger the very financial institutions they were supposed to be overseeing.

The 46 hours of recordings of meetings and conversations come from Carmen Segarra, a Harvard-trained lawyer who was hired in 2011 by the New York Federal Reserve as part of a team overhauling how the banking system was regulated after the 2008 financial crisis.