Without question, the credit rating system is one of the capitalism’s strangest hybrids: profit-making companies that perform what is essentially a regulatory role. The companies serve the public, which expect them to stamp their imprimatur on safe securities and safe securities alone. But they also serve their shareholders, who profit whenever that imprimatur shows up on a security, safe or not.

To make matters more complicated, rating agencies are deeply entrenched in millions of transactions. Statutes and rules require that mutual fund and money managers of almost every stripe buy only those bonds that have been given high grades by a Nationally Recognized Statistical Rating Organization, as the agencies are officially known.

But even if there is no foolproof way to reform the rating agencies, the measures that Congress is now backing are strikingly weak, a number of critics say. There is no talk, for instance, about creating a fee-financed, independent credit rating agency, one modeled along the lines of the Public Company Accounting Oversight Board, which was established to oversee auditors after the Enron debacle  an idea floated by Christopher J. Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman as recently as August.

That approach would attack the conflict of interest problem head on.

Nor is anyone on Capitol Hill suggesting a rewrite of all those rules that put rating agencies in the middle of so much Wall Street action. Instead of cajoling the Big Three into producing more accurate ratings, why not take away the special status of those ratings and make them less important?

Image Scott McClesky, a former F.B.I. agent and the man Moody’s hired as its “designated compliance officer,” testified on Capitol Hill that he was marginalized almost from the start and excluded from important meetings at Moody’s. Credit... Brendan Hoffman/Bloomberg News

“There are a lot of complicated issues that nobody knows how to deal with, like water shortages in different parts of the world,” says Jonathan Macey, a deputy dean at Yale Law School and a member of a bipartisan task force that has conferred with lawmakers about rating agency reform. “But this isn’t one of them. We could solve this one pretty easily with a modicum of political will. It’s just mortifying.”

Meantime, to the consternation of detractors, the companies are now earning fees from a new source: re-Remics, an acronym for resecuritization of real estate mortgage investment conduits. These are transactions that take downgraded mortgage securities and separate the riskiest assets from the strongest, making the strongest easier to sell.