That sounds impressive and popular with all the 'the market doesn't work/they're all corrupt' type of outrage currently doing the rounds, but the failures of ra

That sounds impressive and popular with all the 'the market doesn't work/they're all corrupt' type of outrage currently doing the rounds, but the failures of ratings companies to correctly rate highly complex debt instruments doesn't make them all useless. The fact remains there are a lot of simple, understandable securities which the ratings companies are across and have a long history of payments to look back on. I'm talking about corporate bonds where you can assess the creditworthiness of the company, government (non-US) bonds of stable and credit-worthy nations that pay much more than 0-1%