About Those Ratings Agencies ...

At the heart of the financial crisis are loans that were fatally misjudged. Who will ever believe ratings agencies again? And if you can't believe them, how will lending come back on anything like the previous model? Mark Thoma suspects the worst:

Big shocks don't necessarily shake the informational foundations of markets. There can be an event that occurs in the tail of the distribution of possible events that is viewed as just that, an unusual, costly event, but not one that fundamentally upsets our understanding of how the world works while at the same time undercutting the informational flows we use to understand these markets. I don't think the dot.com crash, for example, caused us to question the reliability of the information we receive the way this episode has. After the crash, we still thought we understood how to use models to process reliable information. But this crisis has destroyed confidence in the information and the models we use, and it won't be easy to bring this back.