Here is another good news/bad news column about the 112th Congress.

In the latest AEI Political Report, the AEI Politics team looks at at the new phase of 2012 campaign from a variety of angles. 

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A controversial dimension of the financial crisis has been the role of credit ratings and the perverse incentives facing rating organizations.

If you look at the U.S. budget trajectory with an eye on the lessons from Japan's recent history, there's a strong case that the U.S. rating should be cut immediately.

End the government-sponsored cartel in credit ratings.

In the housing and mortgage bubble of the twenty-first century, the government sponsored credit rating agencies turned out to be a notable weak spot.

The Shadow Committee believes that the best approach to the reform of credit rating organizations is to remove ratings from the regulatory process. If that is not done, then a minimal reform would be to mandate that the SEC's regulatory use of ratings be made conditional on the achievement by individual rating agencies of objective performance benchmarks.