Brain Drain to Wall Street

I was just reading the WSJ on the survey by Katz and Goldin of Harvard showing the brain drain to Wall St. It is striking that so much brain power has gone into taking advantage of the illusion that yield is desirable (or, put another way, that selling out of the money options is good because "it can never get there"). It's brain power facilitation the systematic (meaning not accidental or randomly wrong) mis-allocation capital. Anyway, I was reading about the brain drain, then I read this in the FT:

"'The debt and the equity markets now both regard these companies as no longer being triple-A, said Andrew Wessel, an analyst at JPMorgan." Does "now" imply that recently this wasn't the case? Perhaps he was misquoted.