The headline on The Wall Street Journal says it all: Wall Street Cheers As Its Nemesis Plunges Into Crisis. Andrew Sabin, a friend of Dick Grasso who Spitzer had sued to recover most of $190 million he had earned as head of the exchange, put it thus: "I said I'd buy Dick some champagne. I'm sure he's happy. I'm sure everybody on Wall Street is happy."

Certainly, the brokers were happy when the news broke that Eliot Spitzer had resigned. Huddled around the TV screens, they broke into applause when he announced his resignation, reports Bloomberg.

And spare a thought for Ken Langone, the man Spitzer sued for rewarding Grasso. ""We all have our own private hells. I hope his private hell is hotter than anybody else's," he told the media.

As the Houston Chronicle's Loren Steffy pointed out this week in his blog, Spitzer made some powerful enemies on Wall Street. And as columnist Froma Harrop says Spitzer was the one who actually stood up to the corporations and took them on for their excesses and fraud. Harrop writes: "It is said that 'friends come and go, but enemies accumulate.' When Spitzer tripped up, his many foes filled the stands and stood up to cheer and gloat. Some of them had good reasons. But in his role as the Sheriff of Wall Street, Spitzer offended a lot of people who needed offending. And he fought for the unconnected at a time when our so-called leaders in Washington could not care less. For that, Spitzer deserves a parting salute: He was on patrol when almost no one else was."

Jay Hancock makes the point perfectly. "While other regulators played pinochle during the worst wave of corporate sleaze in decades, Spitzer had the guts and - yes - the overweening ambition to expose it at its headquarters. Now the guy is humiliated and disgraced. But schadenfreude often says more about the people feeling it than those it is directed against."

Which is what makes TPM Muckraker's take on how the Feds nabbed Spitzer so fasinating.

As an Australian, I find the response to Spitzer's shame and the calls for him to go as quite extraordinary. We have had Prime Ministers and politicians who have been notorious womanizers and pants men. No-one has really cared. And neither should they. But as Elizabeth Pisani writes in The Guardian, Spitzer's shame is all about morality shaping social policy in the US.

"For many years now, social policy in the US has been moulded by morality. (Interestingly, commercial policy hasn't. It's illegal for one adult to pay another for sex, but perfectly legal for two adults to be paid to have sex with one another by a third person, who will film the encounter and then sell it as pornography to other adults.) Morality, which is hard to define let alone to measure, is not a good basis for public policy. Science is a good basis for public policy. Economics, even. But not morality. Look at sex education in the US. The Bush administration promotes abstinence. No information about condoms, nothing about safe sex. The result of this cross-your-legs-and-think-of-God approach, according to official figures released this week, is that a quarter of teenage girls in the US have a sexually transmitted infection. How moral is that? Though morality demonstrably collapses in the face of reality, the US is committed to exporting this approach. Its taxpayers have been asked to part with an astonishing $65bn to pay for HIV prevention and care in the developing world. To get a penny of that money, organisations have to pledge that they will oppose prostitution. The pledge was brought in by former Aids tsar Randall Tobias, handpicked by George Bush. "Former" because he resigned from public life last April, after his phone number was found on the client list of a Washington escort service. Spitzer is in good company."

It's fairly depressing to think of the way Wall Street has been celebrating Spitzer's demise. Oh and by the way, no one on Wall Street has ever paid for sex.