Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and comments below or please email your suggestions for Wednesday's Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz 
1. Not so fair trade - No less than Andrew Chambers at The Guardian is questioning the validity of the Fair Trade movement.
Nestlé has just announced that KitKat "“ Britain's biggest-selling chocolate bar "“ will carry the Fairtrade logo from next month. But how much do consumers really know about the Fairtrade movement? Is it, as some say, an essential safety net that helps poor farmers earn a better living or, as others say, an example of western feel-good tokenism that holds back modernisation and entrenches agrarian poverty?
2. Vigilantes are back - The New York Times' Landon Thomas says the bond vigilantes that bedeviled Bill Clinton in the early 1990s are back and threatening delinquent governments in Britain and Greece (but why not the United States?).
Today, the bond market posse has set its sights on Europe "” particularly Britain and Greece "” where stagnant economies and high levels of government spending have led to the highest budget deficits in the region. Although the left-leaning governments in both countries are struggling to show investors that they have a workable plan to reduce deficits "” which now average around 13 percent of gross domestic product "” bond traders are increasingly demanding higher interest rates to reflect the rising risks. Bond traders last week pushed the spreads between Greek 10-year bonds and their benchmark German counterparts "” a measure of investor confidence in the country "” to highs of 250 basis points after the nation's credit rating was downgraded, raising concerns over Greece's ability to service its enormous debt. In Britain, where the nation's economy and finances have fallen so sharply that investors fear a possible downgrade of the country's triple-A rating, bond traders are also taking a hard line. Last week, yields on gilts were pushed to their highest levels since the depths of the financial crisis, after the Labour Party issued a preliminary budget report that skimped on details of spending cuts. "There is a clear drop in confidence on the part of bond investors," said Mark Schofield, a fixed-income strategist at Citigroup in London. "I think it is all beginning to unravel."
3. Peter Jackson is wealthy enough - Now Peter Jackson is calling for more subsidies for film-makers to compete against the Australians, in this Dominion Post interview with Tom Cardy (who I went through journalism school with). Matt Nolan at TVHE points out rightly that this is a mad path for both Australia and NZ to go down together.
In the end both countries end up subsidising movies, and both sets of taxpayers end up worse off than in the case when neither country subsidises. This is the issue, not only with the subsidies on movies, but on all trade protectionism. That is why we need international co-operation to avoid this type of beggar thy neighbour behaviour.
4. Downgraded - Standard and Poor's has downgraded Mexico's sovereign rating to BBB from BBB+, FT Alphaville reports. 2010 looks to be the year of sovereign rating downgrades and fiscal rectitude driven by bond market vigilantes (for everyone but America and Japan it seems).
"The downgrades reflects our assessment that Mexico's recent steps to raise non-oil revenues and improve efficiencies in the economy will likely be insufficient to compensate for the weakening of its fiscal profile," explained Standard & Poor's credit analyst Lisa Schineller. "This weakening stems from a combination of modest GDP growth prospects and diminished oil production over the coming years."
5. Hyperinflation vs Deflation - The great debate grinds on with this piece from John Williams from ShadowStats, as reported in Zerohedge. Williams seems awfully sure of himself, despite plenty of evidence this year of deflation rather than inflation. Your view?
Before the systemic solvency crisis began to unfold in 2007, the U.S. government already had condemned the U.S. dollar to a hyperinflationary grave by taking on debt and obligations that never could be covered through raising taxes and/or by severely slashing government spending that had become politically untouchable. The U.S. economy also already had entered a severe structural downturn, which helped to trigger the systemic solvency crisis. The intensifying economic and solvency crises, and the responses to both by the U.S. government and the Federal Reserve in the last two years, have exacerbated the government's solvency issues and moved forward my timing estimation for the hyperinflation to the next five years, from the 2010 to 2018 timing range estimated in the prior report. The U.S. government and Federal Reserve already have committed the system to this course through the easy politics of a bottomless pocketbook, the servicing of big-moneyed special interests, gross mismanagement, and a deliberate and ongoing effort to debase the U.S. currency. Accordingly, risks are particularly high of the hyperinflation crisis breaking within the next year. The U.S. has no way of avoiding a financial Armageddon. Bankrupt sovereign states most commonly use the currency printing press as a solution to not having enough money to cover obligations. The alternative would be for the U.S. to renege on its existing debt and obligations, a solution for modern sovereign states rarely seen outside of governments overthrown in revolution, and a solution with no happier ending than simply printing the needed money. With the creation of massive amounts of new fiat dollars (not backed by gold or silver) will come the eventual destruction of the value of the U.S. dollar and related dollar-denominated paper assets. What lies ahead will be extremely difficult, painful and unhappy times for many in the United States. The functioning and adaptation of the U.S. economy and financial markets to a hyperinflation likely would be particularly disruptive. Trouble could range from turmoil in the food distribution chain to electronic cash and credit systems unable to handle rapidly changing circumstances. The situation quickly would devolve from a deepening depression, to an intensifying hyperinflationary great depression.
6. Printing is ending - The US Federal Reserve is nearing the end of its bond buying programme, with 85% of it complete, Calculated Risk points out. How will the world cope? 7. Inevitable fallout - Ireland, unlike Greece, is slashing to the bone to drag its budget under control. The fallout is now hitting hard and all-out strikes are now possible, according to a senior unionist, The Irish Times reports. HT Gertraud.
"The problem we have to recognise now the ambitions for the reforms I have been talking about for six months now lie in tatters. We need to understand that the reason for that is that the people who work to provide public services are angry, upset and very hurt at the way the Government walked away from these negotiations at the last minute".
"I think we are now dealing with a potentially explosive situation. We must recognise is that the main reason for that is that over 250,000 people in the public services whose earnings a year ago were €60,000 gross or less will have taken a 13 per cent enforced pay cut in ten months", he said.
8. Obama's big sellout - Matt Taibi, the journalist behind the Goldman Sachs Vampire Squid story that set the agenda for backlash over banker bonuses, has now written a scathing piece accusing Barack Obama of selling out to Wall St. Sounds about right. Well worth a read. I said a while ago Obama was a liar and a fool. This story bears this out. It's full of juicy detail like this:
What's taken place in the year since Obama won the presidency has turned out to be one of the most dramatic political about-faces in our history. Elected in the midst of a crushing economic crisis brought on by a decade of orgiastic deregulation and unchecked greed, Obama had a clear mandate to rein in Wall Street and remake the entire structure of the American economy. What he did instead was ship even his most marginally progressive campaign advisers off to various bureaucratic Siberias, while packing the key economic positions in his White House with the very people who caused the crisis in the first place. This new team of bubble-fattened ex-bankers and laissez-faire intellectuals then proceeded to sell us all out, instituting a massive, trickle-up bailout and systematically gutting regulatory reform from the inside.
9. Drug money helped - A UN report reckons that drugs money helped keep the global financial system afloat in those dark few days last year, The Guardian reported.
Antonio Maria Costa, head of the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, said he has seen evidence that the proceeds of organised crime were "the only liquid investment capital" available to some banks on the brink of collapse last year. He said that a majority of the $352bn (£216bn) of drugs profits was absorbed into the economic system as a result. This will raise questions about crime's influence on the economic system at times of crisis. It will also prompt further examination of the banking sector as world leaders, including Barack Obama and Gordon Brown, call for new International Monetary Fund regulations.
10. Amusement - This is a fake application from a former investment banker to get into law school. It's from McSweeney's.net. HT James Kwak.
I want to attend law school because I want to make a difference in the world. My desire to attend law school has nothing to do with the fact that I was recently fired from my job as an analyst at an investment bank, where I worked in the mergers and acquisitions group. Since January, I've worked on approximately one merger, zero acquisitions, have played Spider Solitaire 434 times and updated my Facebook status, on average, five times a day. My 401K is down 45 percent. All three of my roommates "” Teddy, Whit, and Dan (The Man) McGregor "” have lost their jobs and are moving back home with their parents. (I feel most sorry for Whit, who's from Cleveland.) I have $350 in savings, which may seem strange because I've been making, with bonus, at least $100,000 a year since graduating from college four years ago (in "Boston." OK ... Harvard.). But New York is expensive. Drinks cost $15. My Hamptons summer share (which was a valuable networking tool) put me back $15,000 last year. This is a long way of saying that law is a tool to promote equality, and to help create a just society. These have always been my goals in life.
11. Totally irrelevant video - Here are the faces behind the voices of The Simpsons. HT Andrew Wilson via email.
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