Eliot Spitzer may have gone down in a blaze of ignominy, but his Wall Street legacy lives on. Barriers placed between equity analysts and investment bankers as part of the $1.4bn global settlement forged after the dotcom bubble made their conflicts of interest apparent, are now well entrenched. One requirement, however, expires this month. Banks will no longer have to provide clients with independent equity research. No great loss, say the banks. Many are dropping the service, maintaining client interest was always low.

The great predicted shake-up, whereby research would be wrested away from large banks, simply failed to materialise. Writing about stocks is expensive and only meets its costs if it brings trading flows. Banks had little incentive to market others’ work. Gauging the popularity of independent research is also tough. Regulator-appointed consultants were responsible for making sure banks provided independent research. But they did not track usage in any precise way. At UBS’s website, such research garnered about 40,000 hits per month; at Lehman, it accounted for between 5 and 10 per cent of requests overall.