Your leader and article about credit-rating agencies argue in their support (“Substandard & Poor” and “Judges with Tenure,” August 13, 2011). Agencies such as Standard & Poor, which recently downgraded America on account of its staggering debt, Moody, and Fitch are there for a purpose. Although their ratings are defended by the agencies themselves as nothing but opinions protected by free-speech laws, they are indispensable to stockmarket investors. The investors can only hope that these opinions are not based on “dodgy analysis,” such as Standard & Poor’s in the fraught downgrade. In particular, the Treasury Department quickly found that the agency had overstated cumulative deficits by some two-trillion. Oops. But you leave it at that. One of the legacies of the laissez-faire era ushered by Ronald Regan and Margaret Thatcher is an ever-stingier government support of statistical offices that provide the basic ingredients of economic analysis. This only increases the value of credit-rating agencies, but a part of the remedy should be in better statistics that would expose the occasional dodginess of their ratings. Some countries’ statistics are so dodgy by now that they elicit nothing but mere opinion.