A couple of days ago, the Financial Times received a furious complaint from Fitch, the credit ratings group. The reason? The FT recently wrote that Fitch had placed the ratings of monoline insurers on “watch” for possible downgrade. And while the general direction of this report was correct, Fitch hotly objected to FT’s use of the word “watch”; instead, its ratings framework for the monolines have apparently been put “on review” – to see if downgrades are needed.

No doubt such semantics matter to lawyers or ratings adicts. But to my mind this hair-splitting illustrates a bigger point: namely just how sensitive – if not, paranoid – the ratings agencies have become these days, in the face of the current vast barrage of political and financial pressure.