there are always the courts as a venue to redress the wrongs perpetrated on the investing public.

From Bloomberg "The California Public Employees' Retirement System, the largest U.S. public pension fund, sued the three major bond-rating companies for $1 billion in losses it said were caused by "wildly inaccurate" risk assessments.

Standard & Poor's, Moody's Investors Service and Fitch Ratings used methods to analyze medium-term notes and commercial paper that were "seriously flawed in conception and incompetently applied," Calpers said in a lawsuit filed July 9 in state court in San Francisco."

I suspect this is not leading simply to a financial penalty so much as a remaking of the damaged ratings business model. Hooray.

And hooray for our system of multiple checks and balances that in the end may bring some measure of justice to an industry at the very heart of this credit disaster.

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