RESEARCH SHOULD PAY ITS OWN WAY

摘要

Everything was on the table when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer began his crusade to clean up Merrill Lynch & Co, in April. Criminal charges, A restitution fund for investors. Even partial reinstatement of Depression-era laws walling off investment banking from research. But Spitzer let Merrill off the hook with a $100 million slap on the wrist after it promised that its investment-banking business will no longer influence how much its analysts get paid. The New York AG dropped an earlier demand that the stock-picking be spun off somehow into an independent entity. In doing so, he essen-tially bought into the Wall Street wisdom that says research can survive only as a subsi-dized function of a full-service firm.