Alex Tarrant presents 90 seconds at 9 am in association with BNZ.

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Barack Obama has said he wants to 'recover every single dime' from the Wall Street bailout in a bank fee plan that may last over 10 years, the New York Times reports. US administration officials said overnight that the fee will be placed on the nation's 50 largest banks and financial institutions with assets over US$50 billion. The plan would look to claw back US$90 billion in lost bailout funds, although US Treasury estimates show the amount of lost funds could be up to US$117 billion.

There were a record amount of foreclosure actions in the US in 2009, and this is expected to be broken in 2010, Reuters reports. A report shows 2.8 million properties with a mortgage received a foreclosure notice last year, up 21% from 2008. As banks in America take more and more properties on to their books, they are going to have to take a measured approach to selling these if they do not want property prices to fall further from where they are now.

Staying with property, and in China there has been more talk of a property bubble. Residential and commercial property prices in the country's 70 largest cities rose 7.8% in December from a year ago, up from 5.7% in November, the Times reports.

Back closer to home, and figures every Kiwi politician will be keeping an eye on. The unemployment rate in Australia fell to 5.5% in December from 5.6% in November. Seasonally adjusted figures show 35,200 jobs were created in December, well above economist estimates of 10,000, Bloomberg reports. However, almost 28,000 of these were part time jobs, interestratenews.com.au reports. Australian workers are now asking for wage increases as they see that their economy escaped the worst of the global downturn. There is also some talk of skills shortages in some areas.

Wage increases and skills shortages in Australia ... could see more Kiwis start to flock back across the ditch in 2010 if the New Zealand economy and labour market undergoes a slow, gradual recovery.