Moody's surveyed its customers recently, and they apparently were in favor of keeping the ratings agency's time-honored letter ratings, AAA and so forth. To many critics, these letter ratings mean little these days, but that is more rhetoric than reality. Still, the agency has some PR issues to contend with. And it is trying to make some hay with some ratings tweaks that the Financial Times has just written about. Moody's launched two new indices that would indicate how fast a security might lose a top rating if the economy changed. This is an obvious hoped-for corrective to the masses of AAA rated CDOs that suddenly ended up on the skids, resulting in mass downgrades.  

For more:
- here's the Financial Times article

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