From Harvard Prof. Lucien Bebchuk:

"The plan for buying troubled assets -- which was earlier announced as the central element of the administration's financial stability plan -- has been recently curtailed drastically. The Treasury and the FDIC have attributed this development to banks' new ability to raise capital through stock sales without having to sell toxic assets. But the program's inability to take off is in large part due to decisions by banking regulators and accounting officials to allow banks to pretend that toxic assets haven't declined in value as long as they avoid selling them."

(http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/corpgov/)

So basically, since the government relaxed its accounting standards, letting banks value their cruddy mortgage-based securities at whatever price they like, they had absolutely no incentive to sell them (at fair market value - er, a much lower price).   So they can go about business as  usual.

You know, sort of like taking out a home equity loan without telling the bank the house has burned down.  Known as "fraud" in insurance circles. 

Um, the emperor's still naked, Mr. Geithner...

From today's NYT:

The failure to establish specific targets on climate change underscored the difficulty in bridging longstanding divisions between the most developed countries like the United States and developing nations like China and India. In the end, people close to the talks said, the emerging powers refused to agree to the specific emissions limits because they wanted industrial countries to commit to midterm goals in 2020, and to follow through on promises of financial and technological help.

Okay, I understand why the BRIC countries, and other developing/emerging states, resist climate change measures.  After all, not fair that we got 100 years to screw up the earth without any babysitting.   Now that we've offshored all our energy-intensive manufacturing, 'course we can gag down climate change regulation without any fancy gel-covered easy-swallow pill coatings.  Relatively speaking.

But don't let china, and the anti-earth free-trade hawks tell you any different: it IS possible to do this without violating our international treaties.  See, e.g., http://worldtradelaw.typepad.com/ielpblog/2009/07/cap-and-trade-the-devil-is-the-details.html

Congress just has to ensure that we apply any tariff/tax without discrimiantion based on nationality.  And includes the back-door stuff, too: if canadian beer has 3.25% alcohol, and american has 3.23%, you can't suddenly impose a "tax" on any beer over 3.23%.  So pick a number that makes sense and doesn't automatically give the home team an advantage.  At least not an obvious one.

In fact, it is so very clear (at least to anyone with even just a passing familiarity with trade treaties and the legal authority encircling them) that it *is* possible to legally regulate trade to save the environment, that any whining about trade agreements is purely a foil.

you know, like racism is really about states' rights.