Fitch Ratings says its business is providing the world with "independent, timely and prospective credit opinions." Judging by its AAA rating on MBIA, it looks like Fitch is 0-for-3.

On November 5, Fitch said it would spend four to six weeks analysing whether the bond-insurance unit of MBIA and six other so-called monoline insurers are worthy of the AAA imprimatur. Four to six WEEKS? Can anyone tell me a good reason why it should take four to six WEEKS to figure this out?

Then there was the big news on December 5 from Moody's Investors Service. A month after saying MBIA was "unlikely" to fall below its AAA capital benchmarks, Moody's changed that to "somewhat likely" and said it would opine further on MBIA and the rest of the bond-insurance industry within a couple of weeks. Standard & Poor's also is studying the matter.

"When we have concluded our analysis, we'll publish on it," Moody's managing director Jack Dorer says. "What we're trying to understand is the risk-adjusted nature of the portfolio."

Somebody here, please just state the obvious: If MBIA is a AAA credit, then Britney Spears is fit to rejoin the Mousketeers.

This horse isn't just out of the barn. It crossed the county line last Christmas and got itself killed trying to dodge traffic. We're talking AAA here, just a notch less bankable than you'd expect from Uncle Sam.

Maybe it should take this long to determine what the right rating is. However, nobody should need this long to figure out that AAA is the wrong rating, anymore than it should take weeks of testing to ascertain that I'm unfit to be quarterback for the New England Patriots.

The market knows this isn't a close call. Last week, credit-default swaps tied to MBIA Insurance Corporation's bonds were 193 basis points, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. In other words, it cost about $193,000 to buy a contract protecting $10 million of bonds from default for five years. That implies about a 15 percent probability of default — for a company rated AAA.

Credit protection on another AAA-rated bond insurer under review, Ambac Assurance, cost 289 basis points, implying about a 22 percent default probability. By comparison, credit-default swaps for a real AAA company like Johnson & Johnson were 15 basis points, implying the chance of default is a tenth of a percent.

MBIA stock is down 59 percent this year and trades for 42 percent less than its book value, showing that equity investors don't believe its balance sheet either.

The last time Moody's published a full report on the company, on October 5, it said MBIA Insurance's Aaa rating and the Aa2 rating for its parent reflected, among other things, their "consistent profitability." That was a few weeks before MBIA reported a $36.6 million net loss for the third quarter, which included a $63.7 million pretax loss from its insurance operations.

Silly me. And here I thought AAA-rated companies weren't supposed to lose money.

So here we go again. The public battering the rating companies have taken this year over their AAA ratings and slow-footed downgrades on all manner of subprime-mortgage garbage wasn't enough. They're going to wait, and wait, and then wait some more. Maybe by then MBIA and its AAA-rated brethren will have scrounged up badly needed capital. This isn't the way it's supposed to work, though. The credit-rating companies are supposed to keep their ratings current.

"A triple-A rating implies they'll make money come hell or high water," says Sean Egan, managing director at Egan-Jones Rating Company in Haverford, Pennsylvania. "It's ridiculous." He says his company's bigger competitors "should have acted about a year ago." Unlike the major credit-rating companies, Egan- Jones's revenue comes from investors who buy its reports, rather than the companies it rates.

Egan's case for why MBIA isn't AAA is simple. The company guarantees more than $650 billion of state, municipal and structured-finance bonds, compared with only $6.5 billion of shareholder equity. Big problems are hitting the subprime collateralised debt obligations it backs. He estimates MBIA needs to raise more than $4 billion of capital; its stock-market value is just $3.8 billion. Plus, there was last quarter's loss.

A Fitch spokesman, Kenneth Reed, declined to comment. S&P spokeswoman Mimi Barker says the company's "review is ongoing, and we expect to have comments out to the market soon." An MBIA spokeswoman, Elizabeth James, didn't return phone calls.

If MBIA and its like got cut, so would the AAA-wrapped bonds of just about everything they insure. Their business may vanish. And the rating companies would be looking at issuing press releases announcing downgrades for thousands upon thousands of municipal bonds.

Maybe some rich uncle (Warren?) will save MBIA. There must be institutions out there that stand to lose billions on the bonds MBIA insures should the company lose its halo. Perhaps some of them will chip in for a bailout.

If nothing else, maybe investors, politicians and the press could please stop referring to these rating companies as credit-rating "agencies," as if they're sworn guardians of the public trust that carry the weight of the government or the pope. They're agencies only in the sense that they are agents of the companies that pay them for their ratings.

The rest of us get what we pay for.

(Jonathan Weil is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.)