Over at our sister publication FierceFinance, editor Jim Kim notes that not only have major financial institutions been slammed during the market's bad times, credit rating agencies have gotten egg on their face too. After all, Standard & Poor's had Lehman Brothers operating groups rated A+ just before things fell apart, Kim notes. Besides, if they hadn't rated subprime mortgage instruments as AAA, maybe the whole market collapse wouldn't have happened. In fact, given their failures of late, have the ratings agencies have been discredited completely? FierceFinance