From your description I believe I know which specific agency you worked for, as I support their technology environment today and it all sounds identical. Do you miss that nice view of the reflection pools yet? :)

A few points:

If ratings contained no additional information beyond that available publicly, then investors would gain no value from using them to make decisions. No one is forced to listen to rating agencies (besides some institutional investors). If they do a bad job of forecasting default, then investors will place less weight…