One of the more depressing and outrageous revelations of the massive Wall Street scandal was the news that the previously Olympian ratings agencies, Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s, were incompetent at best; at worst, they were in bed with the investment banks whose bonds they were supposed to be evaluating. Both agencies, for example, bestowed AAA ratings the highest possible on laughably flimsy mortgage-backed bond contraptions, whose demise almost sank the global economy