This post reviews a recent article in the Wall Street Journal , written by Cezary Podkul and Gunjan Banerji, entitled Inflated Bond Ratings Helped Spur the Financial Crisis. They’re Back . Regular readers will know that the credit rating agencies and their performances over the past two decades have been reviewed extensively and critically here in Financial Regulation Matters on account of the author’s specialism. However, whilst there has been repeated criticism of the agencies themselves, the regulators and their post-Crisis attempts to constrain the industry deserve more attention. The WSJ article suggests that post-Crisis regulatory endeavours have failed and this falls in line with a thesis of this author who has suggested that regulators are regulating imagined, or idealised entities rather than the agencies and the industry as it actually exists . Therefore, we will review the article and ask what its findings mean for post-Crisis regulation in the credit rating arena. T...