THEY are the untouchable kings of finance, secretly deciding all our economic futures but, this week, they were lambasted as blundering and complacent fools.

At long last, the all-powerful credit rating agencies were brought out of the shadows to face the music from MPs sitting on the Treasury select committee.

Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s.

Names still not widely recognised, but slap bang at the top of any list of culprits for the credit crunch and the economic crash.

The rap sheet is familiar. During the boom, the Big Three agencies happily slapped topnotch, triple-A ratings on financial products, fuelling the explosion in sub-prime mortgage lending.

Sadly, when the crunch came, these toxic collateralised debt obligations (CDOs) turned out to be worthless, leaving the banks with unpayable debts and begging for taxpayer bail-outs.

There were, it is alleged, clear conflicts of interest – as the agencies were paid by the companies whose CDOs they were rating.

Yet, incredibly, given this shocking record of failure, the agencies enjoyed a renaissance under George Osborne, as he made them judge and jury over his economic policy.

So, we were told over and over again, savage cuts to public spending must go ahead, or Fitch, Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s would downgrade Britain, interest rates would go up – and the country would go bust, Greek-style.

More and more, this argument has been discredited, not least because France and the United States have been downgraded yet their borrowing costs have fallen.

It was, therefore, a delight to hear one Conservative MP tear into the managing directors of sovereign ratings at Fitch as “hopeless”

– adding that he was “complacent and sometimes smirking”. The committee’s Tory chairman followed up by accusing Standard and Poor’s of making a “$2 trillion mistake”

when it downgraded the US, on the basis that the world’s richest country will default.

Meanwhile, there are calls for a publicly funded European rating agency, or, at the very least, for more firms to weaken the grip of the American Big Three.

It appears the worm is slowly turning, the worm being democratic countries that have run scared of a few self-appointed financial experts.

For, as one former government chief economist pointed out, the Bank of England can create pounds “at the push of a button”. It’s created a cool £325bn so far through quantitative easing. He explained, wearily: “In the event of nuclear war, or an asteroid strike, it is possible the UK government might not pay its debts. Then we’ll have other things to worry about.”

NORTHERN Rock is back in the spotlight at Westminster, following the revelation that the bank will hand £270,000 to a former director following its sale to Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Money.

Jim McConville is poised to pocket the payout through a “long-term incentive plan”, put in place in April 2010 – after the Rock was nationalised.

An early day motion, signed by two Labour MPs – but none from the North-East – condemns UK Financial Investments (UKFI), the body that looks after the bailed-out banks, after it “attempted to block details of the payout” – only revealed after a Freedom of Information request.