Are regulators like Eliot Spitzer pulling their punches? Should they be hitting harder?
From what you know of Wall Street, do you think the problems of the abuses we saw in the 1990s have been solved by this settlement? No, I don’t think it’s solved. You’ll never solve it, I think. What you try to do is mitigate it. My view of this, and many things in the regulatory and legal realm, is that you see a problem, you try to make a patch or repair. You fix the exact problem — or you mostly fix it — but then right next to it, there’ll be some other kind of a problem that arises. … I think the way you want to think about this is, in the lexicon there’s supposed to be a kind of a “Chinese wall” between the analysts on the one side and the investment bankers on the other side. To put it crudely, the analysts are not supposed to act as shills for the investment bankers. The accusation is that, to much too great an extent, they were acting as shills. So what do you do about that? An idealist might say you put up a perfectly, completely impregnable Chinese wall between the two. I
