Last week, the House financial services committee passed an amendment to a bill that would influence the regulation of banks and credit unions. Today, Felix Salmon weighed in. The legislation proposes the creation of the Consumer Financial Protection Agency, which would keep an eye on everything from home loans to credit cards and payday loans. Salmon looks into the heart of the matter: that consumer finance needs plausible and swift regulation. So, he suggests letting the customers do it for them. “[C]onsumer finance is crying out for some kind of centralized, crowdsourced database of bank fees and practices,” he says. “Then violations of CFPA rules could be automatically flagged and forwarded on to the agency as soon as they arise, even without formal examinations.”

Barry Ritholtz finds a little-discussed data point that might illuminate the lending practices during the subprime mortgage meltdown. He reports, “A study found that securitized mortgages were five times as likely to be delinquent as mortgages that were not resold to securitizers.” This bit of info makes Ritholtz think that the nonsecuritizing banks had different lending practices from the banks that quickly passed on the debt. Naturally, banks that hold on to mortgages would be less risky with the debt incurred. And if Rithotlz’s data are correct (oddly, he can’t remember where he found it), it might suggest that the lenders knew what was going on while continuing to lend money to issue bad mortgages. This Ritholtz post is a fitting follow-up to his morning post, publicizing tomorrow’s PBS special on Brooksley Born, the “Cassandra of the derivatives crisis.”

Paul Krugman continues to warn us against the “gold standard mentality,” which, he says, “might lead to premature monetary tightening.” He cites the cover story in this week’s Barron’s that proclaims: ”There’s no need for short-term rates to remain near zero now that the economy is recovering.” But Krugman disagrees, especially because the unemployment rates are still soaring. Krugman sticks to his guns, saying that interest rates should remain low until the country gets firmly back on its feet. And, for him, the key indicators of firm ground are employment and more rapid growth, not the value of the dollar or commodities.

Bradford DeLong wrote a few less-than-flattering posts today about Levitt and Dubner’s new Superfreakonomics book. In one, he says the authors are no longer thinking like economists. Making great use of the semicolon, he writes, “Economists believe that there are always substitutes—alternatives; economists believe that there are always complements—always ways of doing things that reinforce each other, especially in situations of uncertainty in which diversification is especially valuable; economists believe that orders of magnitude are very important and that the right simple numbers are good guides to orders of magnitude.” And there are several points in the book where, Delong says, the authors fail to support their environomic claims with pure economic thinking.