Telling it as it is

It is not only in the equity markets that the impartiality of sell-side research has been under scrutiny. In the fixed income markets, too, the conflict of interest between selling the bond issues that banks have on their books and what they say in their research pieces has led investors to keep a watchful eye on the quality of sell-side credit research. Nowhere near the same amount of criticism has been levelled at fixed income research as equity research, and rightly so. But there is no doubt