A conservatively managed investment bank

Jim Zukin is one of the founding partners of Houlihan Lokey, the independent investment bank. Like many of its peers in the middle market, Houlihan Lokey has had a good crisis, benefiting from the boom in restructuring and its distance -- physically and figuratively -- from Wall Street. But it is a company that is changing, not least in its recent corporate deals firstly, with Orix Corporation of Japan and last month with Knight Capital of the US. These deals allow Houlihan to partner with organisations that have both large balance sheets and access to capital. Will these new moves harm its vaunted independence or has it created a new model for banking that...