Three years ago, investment bankers did not lose any sleep over Eliot Spitzer, the New York state attorney-general. Two years ago they wished he had never been born. Now, they may have to admit that he had a point.

Spitzer reached a $1.4bn (€1.2bn) global settlement with 10 Wall Street banks over conflicts of interest between investment banking and research in April 2003. After an acrimonious process and a series of embarrassing revelations, Wall Street firms were found to have issued over-optimistic stock research to investors to curry favour with corporate clients and win lucrative investment banking business.