So in an sense, the desperate efforts led by the NY regulators to force the ratings agencies to maintain the AAA rating then was successful. It was a political decision, and seen as such, but it gave time to everybody to move away from that market in an orderly fashion.

(The issus was not that the papers were bad per se, just that those only allowed to hold AAA instruments would have been forced to sell massive volumes, which would have caused a price crash. without the obligation to sell in the short term, they could sell to players able to hold the underlying paper even if no longer rated AAA, so the loss existed, but was much smaller).

In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes