Is NPR Doing PR Work for the Credit Rating Agencies?

The major credit rating agencies, Moody's, Standard and Poors, and Fitch are best known for rating hundreds of billions of dollars of subprime mortgage backed securities as investment grade. (They got paid tens of millions of dollars for these ratings.) They are also famous for missing the shipwrecks at Bear Stearns, Lehman, Enron and many other major corporate bankruptcies.

This is important because NPR told listeners this morning that President Obama had to fear not just a default, but...