RE:RE:View of the Acquisition by the Bond Rating PeopleGood points my friend... agreed
If you take a close look at the wording in my post, I carefully chose my words - "listened to them more closely than...." The reason I chose those words was that I did not rely on them completely or take their word as gospel. What I did find over the years was that the buy side and sell side analysts were much more an extension of the firm's (name any investment firm) marketing department than the bond guys primarily because the bond guys' audience/clients tended to be more institutional than the retail market that the buy and sell side guys' audience. So they had more at stake and tended to have a more honest outlook.
To your point, I recall a meeting not long before the sheet hit the fan in 2008 with a bond guy who had about 100 billion AUM who said that since the housing market was only 5% of the US economy we had little to worry about. I put up my hand and asked a rhetorical question - "most of the banks etc are leveraged 30-1, don't you think that matters?" He really didn't have an answer and we all know what happened - that 30-1 leverage became a big problem.
Bottom line here is quite simple. Get the most information you can to make an informed decision and figure out who you can trust the most in a certain situation and more importantly, develop your own skill set to make the final decision.