It sounds minor, but it's critical: dealing with the credit rating agencies. If you really dig down into the financial crisis, the conflicts of interest between the agencies and the financial institutions are utterly central to the mess. If the agencies had been doing their jobs properly, none of this probably could have happened. But the incentives for those agencies are *utterly* fouled up, and that puts the entire financial system at risk. Essentially, we have private corporations performing one of the most central regulatory jobs in the economy, with precious little oversight and extremely strong incentives to put an excessively rosy gloss on things.
So it's good to have a little confirmation of what I expected: Obama *is* talking (quietly, when he can) about the unflashy but crucial details that matter if the economy is going to be put on a sound footing. Whereas McCain is looking for answers that are simple, but mostly wrong...
