Eliot Spitzer

Wall Street greets the resignation of Eliot Spitzer.

Republicans are gleeful at Spitzer's downfall, but if you want to witness real ecstasy, visit Wall Street. As New York's attorney general, Spitzer made his political career on attention-grabbing settlements with banks, insurance companies, and mutual funds, positioning himself as the only man willing to clean up Wall Street's mess. To Wall Streeters, however, he was a bully and a boor, less a legal eagle than a rogue prosecutor and one-man Star Chamber.

Many of the abuses he attacked were real. He went after the tendency of equity research to serve investment-banking clients, rather than the retail investors who were reading it. And his inquiry into mutual funds who were letting big clients profit by trading shares after market close ended a scandalous practice.

But his methods were deeply troubling. MORE

An FBI inquiry implicated New York governor Eliot Spitzer as an alleged client of expensive call-girls.

DC's Mayflower Hotel was grimly quiet last night, dulled by a silence befitting the undertakers' convention it happened to be hosting, or a wake for the political career of its most famous guest in the last month, Eliot Spitzer. In the bar, guests sank into velvet cushions and speculated loudly about what a $4300-prostitute looks like. But their conversation eventually wandered back to other matters, and before long the bar had no reminder of the Mayflower's newest notoriety, other than a single news crew outside the window, and a CNN ticker about a "DC hotel" in the background on the TV, with sound and subtitles conspicuously off. MORE