Schadenfreude is tricky stuff. Wall Street barely had time to savor the travails of erstwhile prosecutor-turned­New York governor Eliot Spitzer before most of the world's markets seized up last month. Spitzer famously pounced on e-mails to crack down on rampant investment banking conflicts of interest; in July the efforts of his staff to use New York State Police records to tar a political adversary came to light, exposed in part through an e-mail trail. But what should have been a summer's worth of self-satisfied sniggering evaporated as quickly as the year-to-date gains on a quantitatively run hedge fund, when the woes...