I've already mentioned that we're trying to redeploy some of our resources to focus on the financial crisis, particularly the potential muckraking angles. And as we do so I keep coming back to the ratings agencies. Bubbles are an inherent and recurrent feature of financial markets. And there are plenty of roots to this crisis. But at a basic level we're talking about lots of big players paying wildly inflated prices for crap and then having investors running up the stock prices of the big players because they didn't realize that there was so much crap on the books. And that sounds like a systemic failure of the role rating agencies are supposed to play in well functioning markets.

As we've looked into this I was surprised to learn that the major rating agencies are paid by the companies they rate, which certainly creates perverse incentives.

So, we're actively in the hunt for our Finance Blogger to help us dig further into these stories. And our own reporting continues here today. But our readers are always our best resource, our competitive advantage as a news operation. And I know we've got a lot of TPM Readers in the financial services industry and the financial press. So help us come up to speed. Send me your thoughts and insights. Point us to the best articles on the topic. It seems obvious to me that there's a big story here. I've got a sense of the structural issues involved. But I'm interested in getting a better grasp of what happened over the last few years, what's been different. I'm looking for the details.