Monday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: 'What America needs is a good war'; Barry White sings about QE II; Macquarie's PR problem; UK mortgage collapse; Dilbert

Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 past 6 pm, brought to you in association with New Zealand Mint for your reading pleasure.

I welcome your additions and comments below, or please send suggestions for Tuesday's Top 10 at 10 via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

I'll pop any surplus suggestions I get into the comment stream.

1. Too big to fail - The AFR reports that the Australian government now has a liability of A$1.2 trillion because of the government guarantees for debt issues by the big four banks and depositers.

2. Macquarie slammed - ACCC boss Graeme Samuel is apparently livid about Macquarie Bank beating up on small businesses over a telephony equipment scam in Australia.

How long before the Macquarie Millionaires get some of the payback due to them after being bailed out by Australian taxpayers and then striding on to keep paying themselves big bonuses with government guarantees.

The Australian debate over how to get out of the guarantees and how the banks negotiate a growing mood of regulatory grumpiness will be worth watching over the next couple of months.

ACCC chairman Graeme Samuel tells Four Corners that he personally asked Mr Moore to ''be reasonable'' in dealing with the small business customers.

''I'd like to think that when the chairman of the ACCC approaches the CEO of a major organisation like this ... that they'd listen to it and react receptively,'' Mr Samuel tells the programme.

''I have to say, we're not encouraged by their reaction at this point in time.'' Four Corners reports that Macquarie has been a major financier of deals for an industry known as ''telephony bundling'', which puts together telecommunications services with electronic goods or other equipment.  

3. Bubbles, bubbles everywhere - Satyajit Das, the derivatives guru that wrote Traders, Guns and Money, speaks here at Radio Live with Andrew Patterson about the US Federal Reserve and its last roll of the dice. He points out it will squeeze cash out into developing markets to create more bubbles.

Well worth a listen.

4. Off a cliff - British mortgage lending fell 93% between August and September, the Daily Mail reports with a tad nervousness. House prices there have started falling again.

Banks and building societies approved just 47,474 home loans last month – the lowest since February, which is traditionally one of the quietest months for house hunting. Net lending, meanwhile – which strips out redemptions and repayments – totalled just £112 million in September, down from £1.62 billion in August.

The figures, published by the Bank of England, brought fresh warnings of house prices falling by 10 per cent plus over the next year.

Property economists at Capital Economics argue average prices need to fall 20 per cent to bring them into line with what buyers, including those just starting out on the property ladder, can afford.  

5. Centralised procurement - Stuff reports Local technology firms are banding together in their own group to make sure any centralised buying of IT doesn't simply see big overseas firms get all the main deals. Good thing too.

The reforms aim to streamline procurement processes, centralise the purchasing of commodity items such as PCs and stationery and deliver "shared services" to government departments. Don Christie, founder of Catalyst IT, said the procurement reforms would disadvantage homegrown companies but that message had not been clearly stated by umbrella industry group NZICT – which was dominated by its "tier one" or higher paying members, which include Hewlett-Packard, IBM and Microsoft.

"Massive contracts by their nature will exclude New Zealand companies. Some of the big multi-national integrators are going to get a huge advantage."  

6. And we thought ours were bad - We report regularly on how much trustees, receivers and liquidators spend winding up finance companies in New Zealand. Here's our 'Deep fees' list here, which is a companion piece to our 'Deep Freeze' list. Now we hear via Reuters that Bernie Madoff's trustee spent US$26.9 million to recover US$849,000 in the second and third quarters, although to be fair he had previously recovered US$1.5 billion.

Irving Picard, the trustee, said in a filing with Manhattan federal court that much of the expense -- $15.8 million -- went to cover fees for his law firm, Baker & Hostetler LLP. Picard said his "ability to call on the resources of Baker & Hostetler in such areas as corporate, real estate, bankruptcy, securities, employment, tax, banking and litigation has been of material assistance."

Since beginning the task of weeding through the aftermath of Madoff's Ponzi scheme, Picard has recovered about $1.5 billion for victims through September 30, the filing said.  

7. Where the growth is going - This chart courtesy of BusinessInsider is fun. It shows container traffic growth over the last 15 years and how it has been skewed to Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Shenzen.

The point is that just back in 1994/1995, trade was far more balanced between top port cities, as you can make out from the innermost colored outlines above. Then over 15 years, the chart just blows-out to the upper right corner, as container trade for Singapore, Shanghai, Hong Kong, and Shenzen become a larger and larger share of the total.

To put things in perspective with the largest U.S. ports, which aren't even shown on the chart above because they're too small, the port of Los Angeles and Long Beach in California handled a combined 11.8 million TEUs in 2009.

8. War. What is it good for? - It might help the economy writes David Broder at the Washington Post. It's hard to believe someone said this out loud, but it shows how desperate the Americans are becoming.

Look back at FDR and the Great Depression. What finally resolved that economic crisis? World War II. Here is where Obama is likely to prevail. With strong Republican support in Congress for challenging Iran's ambition to become a nuclear power, he can spend much of 2011 and 2012 orchestrating a showdown with the mullahs.

This will help him politically because the opposition party will be urging him on. And as tensions rise and we accelerate preparations for war, the economy will improve.

9. How curious - Investors in Europe are getting very nervous. The more conservative ones are so nervous they've pushed covered bond yields above the yields on unsecured bank bonds for the first time, FTAlphaville reports.

This is all slightly unfortunate before New Zealand banks go on a big covered bond selling spree into Europe. See Gareth Vaughan's detailed coverage on covered bonds here.

This is bizarre. It suggests the market is now prepared to pay more for unsecured debt than wonderfully collateralised, never knowingly defaulted, covered bonds — something of an anathema since it implies the ‘collateral’ provided via the covered bond is, err, somewhat irrelevant.

Writing for the EMF, Frank Will, head of covered bond and frequent borrower strategy, RBS Global banking and markets notes that this is something never before seen in the market. Although he himself puts it down to sovereign jitters and supply imbalances.

10. Totally relevant video - Barry White (well someone who sounds a lot like him...) sings about Quantitative Easing. "The credit markets are misbehavin, I think they need a spankin', so that's why we need some special central bankin'..."