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 Tuesday's Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz Our Wally is much more humorous than Dilbert's Wally. 
1. Stocks vs homes - Brian Gaynor's column in the NZHerald looks at the performance of shares versus housing since 1994. He reckons shares have done better over the long term, but points out that the value of housing has exploded versus the value of the stock market and the stock market has been very volatile. Gaynor also acknowledges the poor performance of New Zealand businesses in turning small listed companies into big ones, and keeping the big ones.
Only nine of the top 40 listed companies 15 years ago - Air New Zealand, Cavalier, Guinness Peat Group, Hallenstein Glasson, NZ Refining, Sanford, Steel & Tube, Telecom and The Warehouse - are still listed in the same form today. This remarkable statistic shows that one of our biggest problems is turning good small companies into excellent big organisations. Our failure to do this is one of the main reasons why investors have deserted the domestic sharemarket for residential property. This is reflected in the following figures: The total value of all NZX listed companies has risen from $42.4 billion in December 1994 to just $54.7 billion at the end of October 2009. The total value of the country's housing stock has risen from $165 billion to an estimated $608 billion over the same 15-year period. In other words our housing stock is now worth 11.1 times the total value of the NZX compared with 3.9 times at the end of 1994.
2. Still mucking around? - Rob Stock at the Sunday Star Times reports ANZ National may still be involved in the structured finance deals hammered by the IRD and the courts.
AS ANZ National Bank fights IRD claims it used complex cross-border "structured finance" transactions to avoid tax, analysis by the Sunday Star-Times reveals it is still involved in similar deals helping foreign banks. ANZ National's pending case involves transactions only up to 2005, but it has emerged that one deal remains in place which represents the "flip-side" of the structured finance transactions penalised by the IRD. The bank has lent $132.1m through a chain of subsidiaries to help fund a transaction with French bank BNP Paribas, which Sunday Star-Times understands is similar from the French bank's perspective to the repo deals that landed the New Zealand banks in trouble with the IRD here.
3. Crumbling PIE - Rob Stock also points out that cash PIE funds currently covered by the government's guarantee scheme won't be covered when the scheme is extended from October next year. It seems like the IRD has cottoned on to the big tax dodge. Oy vey...
There's no official explanation for the exclusion, said Kiwibank's Tracey Berry, but the industry believes the government is keen to dampen demand for the tax-advantaged PIE funds "“ portfolio investment entities "“ which have been replacing term deposits.
4. Insurance comparisons - This is a fairly blatant piece of cross promotion of a new service being offered on our site. The Sunday Star Times splashed our new insurance comparison service and led with the following.
ONLY EIGHT in 100 people shop around for insurance, but an extensive nationwide "mystery shop" on house, contents and car insurance suggests many households pay too much. Interest.co.nz has just completed what it says is the largest insurance mystery shop ever conducted in New Zealand and the results show an industry where a lack of transparency masks huge variations in prices, said John Grant, previously with financial giant GE, who carried out the survey.
5. No deposit required - I saw this sign outside Kiwibank's branch in Manners Mall in Wellington. Good to see nothing has changed and that a state owned bank is working hard to rebalance the economy. 6. Barbarous relic - Nouriel Roubini argues that there is a "The new bubble in the barbarous relic that is gold' in this post at roubini.com. Roubini slams the gold bugs.
Thus, the gold bugs are wrong"”or at least very, very premature"”in justifying buying gold as an attack on fiat currency. The velocity of money is still low or falling"”the opposite of a currency crisis or run on the dollar. As a further indication of the collapse of credit/money multipliers, indicators of expected inflation are subdued or falling, despite governments printing money (excess reserves). The high inflation scenario may be constrained even if/when easy money gains too much traction, as the yield curve would steepen sharply, raising the discount rate for risky private sector debt and for corporate equity, limiting the speed of the recovery and hence the ability of states to impose inflation surprises in the context of shortening average debt maturities.
7. Vee haf vays of taxing your bonus Deutsche Bank AG's CEO said Germany's financial sector will have a comparative advantage over other financial hubs because it doesn't plan to tax bank bonuses like Britain and France, Bloomberg reports.
Deutsche Bank AG Chief Executive Officer Josef Ackermann said Germany has a "comparative advantage" over other financial hubs because it doesn't plan to tax bonuses like Britain and France. "To strengthen the financial hub of Germany I think is a very wise move," Ackermann said in an interview in Berlin late yesterday.
8. When the tide goes out - Gretchen Morgenson at the New York Times has an excellent piece on what is being found in the washup from billions of dollars worth of failed mortgages. It seems a lot of people didn't do their paperwork properly during the boom. Now it's a complete mess. HT Troy Barsten via email.
People familiar with the mortgage machine's innards say problems were industrywide. "If you look at the way these structures were built up, there were supposed to be safeguards at every step to make sure all these things were done properly," said O. Max Gardner III, a lawyer in Shelby, N.C., who represents financially troubled consumers. "When you see so many problems across the country with the total inability to produce the documents, then it really makes you wonder: did they really do this?" According to the court documents, Bank of America dropped a number of balls. It improperly transferred $3.7 billion out of Ocala to accounts that had no connection to the investment vehicle, Deutsche Bank said, and it didn't track the mortgages bought and sold on behalf of Ocala. Bank of America also misstated the amount of mortgages held as security for Ocala, the suit contends.
9. A real price crash - This chart of what has happened to Dubai property prices shows what happens when a bubble built on debt bursts. It's from Clusterstock and BusinessInsider. HT Gertraud.
10. Sort of relevant video - This rant from Hitler in the Downfall move has been used a gazillion times by Internet satirists. Here it is applied to the issue of shorting bank shares. HT Sargon Elias via email. My favourite ersatz Hitler line is: "The bloggers are going to have a field day with this. They're worse than the tabloids." H
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