Friday's Top 10: Even an uber-dove says 'Sept-taper'; Hello Kitty's billions; China's 'Castles in the Air'; Little Brothers galore; Our world-beating sovereign wealth fund; Clarke and Dawe; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at midday today. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz. See all previous Top 10s here.

This is my last regular Top 10 so today's version is going to be fairly light. I'll be back once a week on a Wednesday with a Top 10 from September 25. David Chaston will keep publishing his Monday Top 10 and there'll be a variety of guest contributors for a Friday Top 10, but we won't be publishing on a Tuesday or Thursday. I have been doing a Top 10 most days for the last six years and it's time I gave it a rest. I hope you've enjoyed it. Cheers. Bernard.

1. Even a 'dove' is saying 'taper' - Matthew Klein from Bloomberg has written a nice piece explaining why renowned central banking theorist Michael Woodford is recommending the Fed 'taper' its quantitative easing.

Woodford is renowned as the father of 'forward guidance' as a way for central banks to ease monetary policy once they have cut their policy rate to 0%. Here's a useful profile on him.

We can thank him for the US Federal Reserve's current promise to keep its rates at 0% until the unemployment rate falls below 6.5%.

Our Reserve Bank has its own form of forward guidance with its promise not to hike rates in 2013 and to start hiking them later in 2014. 

Woodford is seen as something of a 'dove' so his recent comments in favour of tapering were pounced on. It's all very topical ahead of next week's meeting where a decision to start 'Sept-taper' is considered a possibility.

Here's Klein:

For Woodford, the most important point is that the Fed's balance sheet cannot keep growing without imposing costs on the financial system and broader economy -- even when inflation is low and unemployment is high.

Treasury bonds are uniquely useful for savers. When the Fed makes these securities more expensive -- or restricts their supply through asset purchases -- the central bank harms regular savers without doing much to boost the broader economy. Moreover, the relative scarcity of newly-issued Treasury bonds has been causing havoc in the repo markets.

2. Other ways to impress your girl - This is a bit of fun. Unless you're the potential bride. In Kazakhstan there's a guy offering 'mock' attacks on a potential bride where the potential groom 'saves' the bride from the mock attack to show the bride how much he really cares and how much of a real man he is. Eurasianet has the story.

The Cupid behind the scenes is Almaty student Alan Temirbayev. He was inspired after impressing his girlfriend with his macho style during a real-life assault two years ago.  “We have special effects, shots, whatever you want can be done,” the brains of the operation said. “It’s essential to make it all look natural, so that the girl is frightened and the guy sees them all off.”

The girl may well take fright. Bride kidnapping is not uncommon in Kazakhstan. 

3. What it feels like to be a censor - Here's a Reuters story from China about what it's like to be one of the army of censors who delete Sina Weibo (micro-blog) posts in China. Monitoring comments on Interest.co.nz is not like this at all...

Reuters got a glimpse of the Sina Weibo censorship office in Tianjin, half an hour from Beijing by high-speed train, one recent weekend morning.

A dozen employees, all men, could be seen through locked glass doors from a publicly accessible corridor, sitting in cramped cubicles separated by yellow dividers, staring at large monitors. They more closely resembled Little Brothers than the Orwellian image of an omniscient and fearsome Big Brother.

"Our job prevents Weibo from being shut down and that gives people a big platform to speak from. It's not an ideally free one, but it still lets people vent," said a second former censor.

4. Wonder if it got a building consent - I live in Wellington now so this building in China called a 'Castle in the Air' doesn't look that...er... structurally sound. 

This one way to build up rather than out. 

5. Hello Kitty - It turns out the Japanese franchised cat is worth billions, Bloomberg reports. Who knew? 

In 1960, Tsuji started Yamanashi Silk Center Co. with 1 million yen in capital, selling silk goods and rubber beach sandals. He introduced his first character, Strawberry, in 1962, pioneering the use of character copyrights, the book said.

The cartoon cat boomed after Tsuji sold his first Hello Kitty product, a coin purse, in 1975, before adults lost interest. It then had a resurgence in the 1990s, standing out from a stable of 450 Sanrio characters. In 2000, fist-fighting mobs thronged McDonald’s Corp.’s fast-food outlets in Singapore to buy dolls of Hello Kitty and her companion, Dear Daniel, dressed in wedding outfits.

“Part of it is making cute into cool,” Yano, the author of “Pink Globalization: Hello Kitty’s Trek Across the Pacific,” said. “Every time you see the outrageous picture of an MMA wrestler wearing a pink Hello Kitty thong, you have to laugh.”

6. Plaudits for the NZ Super Fund - Given we're all thinking about our Larry-beating sailors and their high tech exploits overseas, here's a piece from America's Institutional Investor magazine lauding our own NZ Super Fund. 

When governments set out to launch sovereign funds or public pension funds, they are often biased with an assumption that these funds will never be able to compete with the private sector. Over time, this assumption is given credibility by the fact that the sponsors of these funds under-resource the teams in charge, while over-paying external asset managers and service providers. This creates a vicious downward cycle whereby pensions become increasingly dependent on external managers (who increasingly over-charge them for services they claim are beyond their capabilities). As a result, an awful lot of people genuinely believe that investment management is something that only the private sector can do; that public sector organizations are inevitably dysfunctional and should be protected from themselves...

And then this happens: A sovereign fund drops some science on the investment management industry with a 26% year and a 9% decennial IRR. That SWF is the New Zealand Superannuation Fund, and it is fundamentally challenging the notion that public funds can’t compete with the private sector.

7. America and class - America likes to think of itself as a classless society. Here's the NY Times with a piece on class at one of its bastions of wealth: Harvard University.

8. Ageing and migration - Japan is notorious for not allowing in many migrants, despite the need to revitalise its ageing population and economy. Here's FTAlphaville with a look how that's changing...a bit.

9. America's real problem - It is the world's largest economy so we should take notice. Here's a useful bunch of charts via WaPo's Wonkblog of America's post-crisis economy.

This one tells the story.

10. Totally Clarke and Dawe on a peculiar election result in Australia. There is a 'Beekeepers for taller buildings' party. Apparently.