Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 to 12. I welcome your additions and comments below or please send suggestions for Tuesday day’s Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz We welcome insubordianation at interest.co.nz

1. 'Smiling like cats' - Rob Alloway tells the Sunday Star Times and Radio Live's Sunday Business (which I contribute to) all about how Hanover's Mark Hotchin forgave the personal guarantees by some of his developer mates for loans that were then sold to Allied Farmers a few days later.

One personal guarantee was for more than $20m and the other for "several hundred thousand", Alloway said.

He said there was no commercial reason he could think of for doing it, particularly for such a large portion of Hanover's loan book. He said it smacked of "looking after your mates before you jump off the ship".

"Some of these things we did not know about until after [the deal was done]," Alloway said. "We called those two borrowers in, and they were smiling like cats."

Alloway said he believed the relationship between finance companies and some borrowers had been too cosy. "I think this is more of a systemic thing that has been running and is not just associated with Hanover, but other finance companies as well."

2. Just Ponzi schemes - Brian Gaynor let rip in the best possible way in his NZHerald column on Saturday, arguing regulators were asleep at the wheel in allowing finance companies to operate like Ponzi schemes.

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The Companies Office, Securities Commission , accounting profession and independent directors were asleep at the wheel as many investors lost a major percentage of their life savings.

Owners of these finance companies, particularly Mark Hotchin and Eric Watson, are still issuing woefully inadequate investment statements and prospectuses as they continue to borrow money from the public. Why are these businessmen still able to raise money from the public without fully disclosing their involvement in failed companies?

He refers specifically to FAI Money.

New Zealand has minimal investor protection with the exception that public issuers must fully disclose all important issues. This is based on the premise that investors can then make fully informed and rational investment decisions.

In light of this, why have Hotchin and Watson not been required to disclose in the FAI offer documents that they made a complete hash of Hanover Finance and have caused considerable hardship and financial distress to individuals who invested in that company?

3. China tightens in a new way - This is a story that appears small, but may appear larger when looking in the rear vision mirror. China plans to nullify all guarantees local governments have provided for loans taken by their financing vehicles as concerns about credit risks on such debt surges, Bloomberg reports.

The Ministry of Finance will also ban all future guarantees by local governments and legislatures in rules that may be issued as soon as this month, Yan Qingmin, head of the banking regulator’s Shanghai branch, said in an interview. The ministry held meetings on the rules on Feb. 25 with regulators including the China Banking Regulatory Commission and the People’s Bank of China, Yan said March 5.

China’s local governments are raising funds through investment vehicles to circumvent regulations that prevent them from borrowing directly. A crackdown on local- government borrowing, estimated at about 24 trillion yuan ($3.5 trillion) by Northwestern University Professor Victor Shih, could trigger a “gigantic wave” of bad loans as projects are left without funding, Shih said this month.

“Beijing’s fiscal situation probably isn’t as good as it looks at first glance,” said Brian Jackson, an emerging markets strategist at Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong. “Perhaps at some stage the central government is going to have to bail out the banks or the regional governments and take it on its own balance sheet.”

4. China resists - China appears to be giving the rest of the world the fingers over the rest of the world's demand for China to let its currency appreciate to fix some of the imbalances in global trade and capital flows. Here's the New York Times on the latest comments over the weekend from the big Chinese political congress, which the whole world should be watching closely.

At a Saturday news conference, the central bank head, Zhou Xiaochuan, said China should be “very cautious” about revaluing its currency, also known as the yuan, as long as major economies remained mired in slow growth.

He called China’s practice of pegging the renminbi to the dollar a “special foreign exchange mechanism” made to respond to the world financial crisis. Such mechanisms will be abandoned “sooner or later,” he said, but “we must be very cautious and discreet in choosing the timing.”

China had allowed its currency to slowly appreciate against the dollar until late 2008, when world economies sagged under the weight of the United States banking and securities collapse. Most economists say the Beijing government acted to maintain the price advantage of Chinese manufactured goods, a linchpin of the Chinese economy, at a time when exports were drying up.

Now that China’s economy remains robust and its exports are recovering, Western governments have pressed Beijing to stop keeping the renminbi artificially low. President Obama and others say the Chinese currency policy helps keep Chinese exports cheap but depresses competing economies that cannot match the artificially low prices.

On Saturday, Mr. Zhou offered no timetable for allowing the renminbi to resume its rise against the dollar, but he noted that it could take two or three years for global export markets to recover from the financial collapse.

5. Aspergers hero - I have a couple of close family members who have a few wonderful quirks that qualify them as having Aspergers' Syndrome.  This story from Michael Lewis in Vanity Fair is a great (if long) read on how one exceptionally bright and introverted neurologist managed to out-research Wall St and be ready for the sub-prime debacle before anyone else. HT Troy Barsten via email.

People with Asperger’s couldn’t control what they were interested in. It was a stroke of luck that his special interest was financial markets and not, say, collecting lawn-mower catalogues. When he thought of it that way, he realized that complex modern financial markets were as good as designed to reward a person with Asperger’s who took an interest in them. “Only someone who has Asperger’s would read a subprime-mortgage-bond prospectus,” he said.

6. Simply unsustainable - The US Congressional Budget Office has warned that Barack Obama's forecasts for budget deficits underestimate the true size of the problem, Bloomberg reports. America is bankrupt. At some stage the world will work this out and force Obama (or whoever is in power at the stage) to cut its cloth to fit. Maybe even American voters (the teabaggers at least) might force him to do it.

The nonpartisan agency said yesterday the deficit will remain above 4 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product for the foreseeable future while the publicly held debt will zoom to $20.3 trillion, amounting to 90 percent of GDP by 2020. By then, interest payments on the debt will have quadrupled to more than $900 billion annually, the report said.

Deficits between 2011 and 2020 would total $9.76 trillion, the CBO said. Economists generally consider deficits topping 3 percent of GDP to be unsustainable because that means government debt is growing faster than the ability to pay back the money.

7. The bond vigilante - The world's biggest bond investor, Bill Gross at PIMCO, has some interesting views in his latest newsletter on where the world might go. He is particularly concerned about governments who choose to print and spend. His comments should serve as a warning for all governments and voters. Sovereign debt is no safe haven any more and we should not be so complacent about simply borrowing more to fix our problems, even leaky building problems.

Shaking hands with the government was a brilliant strategy in 2009 when it was assumed that governments had an infinite capacity to leverage themselves.

But what if they didn’t? What if, as Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff have pointed out in their book, “This Time is Different,” our modern era was similar to history over the past several centuries when financial crises led to sovereign defaults or at least uncomfortable economic growth environments where real GDP was subpar based on onerous debt levels – sovereign and private market alike. What if – to put it simply – you couldn’t get out of a debt crisis by creating more debt?

Government bailouts and guarantees such as those evidenced and envisioned in Dubai and Greece, as well as those for the last 18 months with banks and large industrial corporations across the globe, suggest a more homogeneous “unicredit” type of bond market. If core sovereigns such as the U.S., Germany, U.K., and Japan “absorb” more and more credit risk, then the credit spreads and yields of these sovereigns should look more and more like the markets that they guarantee. The Kings, in other words, in the process of increasingly shedding their clothes, begin to look more and more like their subjects. Kings and serfs begin to share the same castle.

An investor’s motto should be, “Don’t trust any government and verify before you invest.” The careful discrimination between sovereign credits is becoming more than casual cocktail conversation. A deficiency of global aggregate demand and the potential impotency of policymakers to close the gap are evolving into a life or death outcome for the weakest sovereigns, with consequences for credit and asset markets worldwide.

8. Double Dip - Nouriel Roubini is now warning of a double dip recession in the United States. The full article is for subs only - HT Colin via email

A slew of poor economic data over the past two weeks suggests that the U.S. economy in 2010 is headed for – at best – a U-shaped recovery. The macro news, including data on consumer confidence, home sales, construction and employment, actually suggests a significant downside risk even to the anemic 2.7% growth which RGE forecast for H1. With the positive effects of the historic levels of fiscal stimulus due to fade this year, the U.S. faces at best a 1.5% growth rate in H2, which looks too close for comfort to a tipping point of a double-dip.

9. Totally irrelevant picture - This is my office setup. Just kidding. Some day trader has a thing for multiple screens.

10. Totally relevant video - Stephen Colbert is thrilled about Europe's economic decline.