Republished from: “The Economist:”
Time to sweep away an artificial distinction
Feb 8th 2014 | From the print edition
IMAGINE that the stockmarket was divided into two. The big investment banks—Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Bank of America Merrill Lynch—would create lists of the shares that they liked. These approved shares would be classed as IB, for investment-bank-approved, and would trade on a higher valuation (ie, lower yield) than equities they did not like, which would be lumped together in …