Yet this remains unchanged.
Anyway, some structure was put in place by the government settlements. For example in Moodys government they agreed to:
* Separation of Moody’s commercial and credit rating functions by excluding analytical personnel from any commercial related discussions and excluding personnel responsible for commercial functions from determining credit ratings or developing rating methodologies;
* Changes to ensure that specified personnel are not compensated on the basis of the company’s financial performance;
and a few other things
The separation of concerns seems similar to the Dotcom implosion era settlements to how equity research could be paid, and that they had to be firewalls off from the parts of the bank bidding on equity/debt/loan offerings with the companies that research reports were being written on.
Probably the biggest outcome was that the market now understood credit rating agencies are barely worth the bytes they are recorded in, and they are taken with large grains of salt now.
So far from perfect, but also far from the narrative of "nothing changed".. like much in life.
CDO credit ratings were a perverse incentive race to the bottom in terms of quality, because it was issuer-paid.
The ratings agencies essentially bid on future business with the banks by issuing rosier ratings than their competitors.
Also, they paid billions in fine settlements after the fact.
The record keeping likely contributed to them being able to piece together the agencies becoming more and more lenient, and the internal dialogue between analysts & sales.