Blodget was an internet analyst with Merrill Lynch, one of the world’s biggest investment banks. He and his team were floating high on the dot.com bubble, and their bosses were making multi-millions by advising companies on flotations, mergers and aquisitions. They needed business to be booming and their supposedly independent and objective analysts could fuel that boom by talking up the market.

But Blodget knew the dot.com bubble was just that - a flimsy, short-lived fantasy of making a fortune. He knew that many firms were bound to go pop. But he didn’t tell the ordinary folk who valued his investment tips and for whom he was a household name with a TV business channel slot.

No, he just put his opinions in internal emails. ATHM stood for dot.com firm excite@home. Blodget might call it a “piece of crap”, but his bank’s advice to investors was to accumulate its shares. Similarly, another company called Lifeminders was officially described as “an attractive investment”. Not in the opinion of its analyst, whose salary in November 2000 has been estimated at $12 million. He messaged a colleague, saying: “I can’t believe what a piece of shit that thing is.”

Blodget must have known he was doing wrong. He didn’t want to be “whore for the f-king management,” he told a colleague, adding that people were losing their retirement money because Merrill Lynch employees didn’t want the bosses to get mad at them.

Well, the bosses didn’t get mad, but the US attorney-general did. In the summer of 2001 Eliot Spitzer launched an investigation into “double dealing”. Earlier this year he described his findings as “a shocking betrayal of trust by one of Wall Street’s most respected names”.

The bank does not admit any wrongdoing, but Blodget has taken voluntary redundancy. Presumably he is now reflecting, like Hamlet, on what a piece of work man is.