WSJ.com – The Spitzer-Weill Stock Trade :: Okay so here we are – a huge $1.4 billion dollar settlement and all the hoopla around it. It is one more incident when Spitzer decided to let the Wall Street off the hook. Okay so Citigroup was made to pay $400 million – does Mr. Spitzer really know how much CitiBank made in profits during the bubble and how many people were decimated by the telecom bust and Jack Grubman’s compromised recommendations.

Wall Street Journal had something to say about this and I agree: “Spitzer’s claim, uttered on Friday, that his investigators had “discovered actual wrongdoing” will remain only his opinion since nobody will be charged with a crime.”

“Getting back to business is what this deal was all about. Mr. Spitzer has his eye on the governor’s office, and New York’s biggest industry might well reflect back on this settlement and decide that Mr. Spitzer is a man with whom business can be done. Meanwhile, we’re left hoping that small investors, even without Mr. Spitzer’s help, will have learned that the way to invest for the long-run is not to go chasing stock tips from an industry in the business of promoting individual stocks,” The Journal wrote.

“Why aren’t they reimbursing us private investors who lost so much money by not selling because brokerage reports remained favorable?” asked an indignant Jay M Pasachoff in a letter to the New York Times.

But then those of us who put faith in politicans are bigger fools than those who believe that there is Santa Claus.