Top 10 at 10: Aussie house price crash?; Mark Weldon attacked; Bernanke 'total failure'; Where's the missing gold; Securitised sexual favours; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 from around the Internet at 10 am. I welcome your additions in the comments below. I always say yes...or....no. 1. American newsletter writer and fund manager Harry Dent has predicted Australian house prices will fall 40% and the All Ordinaries Index will almost halve in a crash by 2011. Dent predicted the recent crash in American stocks and the decade-long Japanese slump, according to his Wikipedia entry. He uses a theory of demography that essentially says baby boomers stop spending in their 50s and this will drive older economies into long recessions.

Dent popularized the baby boomer age-wave theory.^[2] According to him, as a result of baby-boomers seeing their children leave home, those boomers are then free to focus on paying down debt and saving for retirement, which means spending less, which means the stock-market should peak sometime between 2007 and 2009. It is based on his observation that spending peaks around age 50 for individuals at the average point for a family's children to leave home.

Meanwhile, here's what he has to say about Australia, as reported in the Courier Mail. Australians will be choking on their Kornies this morning. HT Andrew Patterson.

"When you have to deleverage a major bubble in stocks and housing and commodities . . . it doesn't just get over with in one year with a nice stimulus program," he says. Mr Dent, who predicted Japan's 1990s recession and the present economic crisis, yesterday began an Australian speaking tour in Brisbane. He says a "perfect storm" is brewing where a peak in spending by baby boomers will collide with the global commodity bubble to "leave behind the next great crash". Although Australia's All Ordinaries Index may peak at between 4500 and 5000 points by the end of this year, he says a crash in about 2011 will see it slump to about 2000 points. He says our house prices are "among the most overvalued in the world" and will backtrack by as much as 40 per cent while unemployment "“ now at 5.7 per cent "“ will hit double digits. "I would say Australia is not paying close enough attention to the worldwide housing bubble and banking crisis," he says.

2. Here's my NZHerald.co.nz blog where I detail 10 ways baby boomers could redeem themselves and turn around the massive inter-generational wealth transfer from the younger generations to the retiring generations. 3. Fran O'Sullivan at NZHerald puts a not so gentle boot into Mark Weldon for his criticism of the performance and practices of some of the state owned enterprises. She argues he is conflicted because any privatisations may end up on the NZX, which would boost his bonus. It seems Mark Weldon had a go at the SOEs in a room filled with a bunch of SOE directors.

It wasn't long before the barbs started flying around the beltway: Why doesn't Weldon deliver the same message to some of the other relative basket-cases among NZ's cache of publicly listed companies who also sponsor high-profile events? Isn't Weldon just making the case for SOEs to be partially privatised - a step which would substantially boost the size of the NZX and by implication Weldon's performance bonus? In other words, self-interest was to the fore. Not quite the take-out the NZX boss wanted.

4. This is a fun video from US hedge fund trader Nick Gogerty that puts US government bond swap spreads to music. Not sure what it all means, but it does show they've gotten steeper recently, as have ours. Here's a chart series we do of New Zealand's rate curves. 5. A great cartoon on the fractional reserve banking system. Yes it is possible. HT Kevin 6. Mish at GlobalEconomicAnalysis argues that US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is a total failure and unsuited for his role.  He doesn't hold back.

Bernanke is a disingenuous liar with a memory problem. He is also an economic dunce who does not understand the cause of great depression nor could he spot a housing/credit bubble visible to nearly every blogger in the country. However, like his mentor Greenspan, Bernanke believes that every problem can be cured by throwing money at it. Finally, he is a creative, political power grabbing hack who gives memorable speeches about throwing money out of helicopters

7. The Royal Canadian Mint seems to have lost 17,500 ounces of gold worth C$19 million, the Globe and Mail reported. Do you have it? The Canadians have no idea. They've only just worked out that it's missing. No wonder the Canadian dollar is called the 'Loonie'

An independent review of the Royal Canadian Mint's records has concluded that the disappearance of 17,500 troy ounces of gold "“ worth about $19-million at current prices "“ does not appear to be an accounting error. With that ruled out, it's seen as more likely that the metal was stolen from the mint's gold-refining operations, not only without anyone noticing, but with officials scratching their heads for months about whether there was really a theft at all.

8. This is a thoughtful rumination in Business Week on whether a Harvard MBA is worth it from former business journalist Philip Delves Broughton. HT Felix Salmon

Broughton's memoir of his experiences at HBS is now out in paperback, and I can recommend it: he nails the tone of delusional self-congratulation that seems to pervade HBS alumni. I suspect that the heyday of the MBA "” the extremely expensive piece of paper which pays for itself through massively inflated earnings after graduation "” is now a thing of the past. The finance-heavy courses, in particular, should surely be ripe for what their students might like to think of as "consolidation" "” what the rest of us would call shuttering. It's clear, in hindsight, that they did more harm than good. So why perpetuate these things?

9. Easy money is reflating US house prices, but it can't be trusted, says Rolfe Winkler at Reuters.

Low interest rates, along with lending structures that allow people to borrow more relative to their income, only offer a temporary sugar high for house prices.  There won't be a sustainable increase in prices until there's a sustainable increase in buyers' income.  And that's not happening any time soon, not with unemployment speeding towards double-digits.

10.  Eliot Spitzer (yes the guy with the bad prostitute habit) argues in Slate that giving the Federal Reserve more power would be a bad idea. He is persuasive and should be listened to. He was a very serious fraud hunter in his day.

The Fed's power over all things economic is hard to overstate, and it now desires even more, seeking the title of "systemic risk regulator." Some of us have argued that regulators"”and the Fed in particular"”have had virtually all the power they needed to avert the economic traumas we have been living through: They just failed to use it. Yet the proposed formalization of the Fed's mega-regulator role requires that we lift the veil that has shielded it from scrutiny for too long. The United States should not lightly put our fate back in the hands of the very entity whose oversight of the economy and financial sector brought us into the abyss. The Fed's lack of accountability and transparency is no longer justified by its record or sound principles or public policy. Granting the power without asking the tough questions would be following the path of least resistance"”regulators don't want to answer the tough questions, and legislators would still rather defer to the Fed than grapple seriously with a tough problem.

Here's Jon Stewart on Bernie Madoff's 150 year prison sentence. Apparently he's started a fund in prison...a Ponzi scheme paying out securitised sexual favours.