It's a bit more complicated too - rather than the AAA ratings being completed unfounded, they often seemed to have justification (at least on the surface), as various kinds of CDOs were typically packaged with insurance baked in, to make them appear less risky to the ratings agencies' models. One big problem ended up being that a lot of those insurance payouts were theoretical, as the entity on the other end (often ultimately AIG) didn't have have the money to pay out when so many mortgages were defaulting.
But, yeah. The agencies didn't really have much incentive to be skeptical of their models.
But, yeah. The agencies didn't really have much incentive to be skeptical of their models.