Brad DeLong had a quiet day, providing his usual daily links and excerpting (at length) Dan Froomkin's final column, with minimal commentary.

Paul Krugman ventures the uncharted terrain where cap-and-trade legislation meets globalization. It seems like the World Trade Organization has put (some portion) of its weight behind efforts to regulate carbon emissions by tentatively supporting border tariffs on carbon imports. Krugman lauds it as good news because major U.S. oil companies are already threatening to close domestic refineries and import more product from overseas to avoid paying full taxes on their carbon emissions.

Barry Ritholtz completed a lengthy post about the Community Reinvestment Act (CRA), reasserting his opinion that it is not to blame for the mortgage crisis. This time, it was in the form of a "thought experiment" in which he asks us to imagine that "the discredited far right meme is actually correct" and the CRA is to blame for the housing and mortgage crises. Ritholtz maintains that if the CRA were responsible for the meltdown several outcomes would have occurred, including but not limited to: 1. scads of toxic CRA defaults littering TARP banks and 2. even worse crashes among CRA banks that frequently provided these mortgages.

And, as Ritholtz is quick to point out, these things have not happened. Furthermore, he says, the housing and mortgage crises have hit the worst in "non-CRA regions," or "the Sand States," as Ritholtz calls them (California and Arizona, for example).

Felix Salmon's best post for the day was on FDIC Chairwoman Sheila Bair. In addition to making her job a lot harder, the financial crisis has led her to quit trying to sell her house. She's taken the 14-room abode off the real estate market because, according to Salmon's guesstimate, she was unable to get at least $695,000 for it. Salmon happily notes that the house sports a counter-current, swim-in-place pool. Shockingly absent from his analysis, though, is any explicit mention of what Bair's decision to hang onto the home—strange aquatic device and all—really means: One of the nation's top finance overseers will get to keep waving her arms and kicking her feet without actually getting anywhere.