Credit rating agencies are enjoying a sigh of relief. Brought as far as the scaffold of public opinion for their role in the financial crisis, execution has been stayed by governments – most recently by the US Treasury’s plan for regulating them. Like European Union rules earlier this year, the plan lets raters off with a rap on the knuckles.

The various new requirements are all sensible: compulsory registration and regulatory supervision, no consulting for rated companies, stricter rules on conflicts of interest, and more disclosure of how ratings are arrived at. They are also mostly innocuous, and do little to affect the main reason raters became implicated in the crisis.