The credit rating agencies should now downsize by 100% of their staffs.
Actually, if they could accurately report that would be a start.
The story of the credit agencies remains to play out. In what amounts to a macro version of a crooked appraiser pumping the value of a to-be-bought home so that a shaky loan will go through, these agencies saw that they would be edged out of the very lucrative rating biz if they applied actual intelligence to the truckloads of crap debt tranches that were coming to market. And so they played along. My prediction is that these cos will be entangled with piles of lawsuits for a very long time to come.