Top 10 at 10: 'Mindful rather than Mindless Consumption'; Dairy effluent field days; 'Fed bails out world'; Dilbert

Here are my top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and suggestions in the comments below. My apologies for the delay today. The South Canterbury prospectus proved too juicy to ignore. We don't check our spam folders... 1. Diplock headlock - Fran O'Sullivan delivers a justified bollocking to Securities Commission chairwoman Jane Diplock in her NZ Herald column. She also takes a swipe at the transparency of South Canterbury, which released a statement last night about its new prospectus, but didn't release the prospectus itself immediately.

Much of the public questioning over the complex arrangements behind chairman Allan Hubbard's web of inter-linking companies has come from media in recent months. It was instructive that the press release announcing the move came well before a copy of the prospectus with all the underlying details was put on the website at 6pm yesterday. (SCF's minders are dab hands at exploiting tight media deadlines). Despite the biggest financial bust in two decades which wiped squillions off the value of shareholders' investments worldwide and exposed a lot of shonky practices, Diplock's commission seems to be focused on using its "surveillance cycle" exercises to educate companies about the greater compliance standards they now have to meet under (NZ) International Financial Reporting Standards instead of publicly throwing the book at delinquents. It is a fat lot of good requiring the companies to lift their game next time round. At the very least Diplock should name the companies so that investors can make their own judgments and require the affected companies to reissue any defective statements. The problem is when Diplock first crossed the Tasman to take up her role as the commission's first executive chairperson she was scathing over the "old boys club" that presided over the NZ market. Six years on, she has become part of the club herself: "Duchessed" as they would say in Australia. Many who took part in the recent stakeholder audit of the commission recommended Diplock should kick herself upstairs and bring in a chief executive to run the shop. But that's yet to happen.

2. Vasectomy time - This video from Young and Rubicam Chief Insights Officer John Gerzema at the often excellent TED (Technology Entertainment Design) conference is worth watching. It's 16 minutes long, but Gerzema's insight into the change in US consumption patterns is useful. He talks about a move to 'mindful rather than mindless' consumption as consumers try to become more liquid and deleverage. That comment actually generated applause. His best factoid is that vasectomies have risen 48% in America in the last year. He also talks about the rise of alternative currencies, 'cow pooling', 'carrot mobs' and 'momversations'.

3. 'Break up the banks' -  Bank of England governor Mervyn King apparently wants to break up the 'Too Big to Fail' banks, FTAlphaville reports.

"Never in the field of financial endeavour has so much money been owed by so few to so many. And, one might add, so far with little real reform." That's Bank of England governor Mervyn King, speaking in Edinburgh on Tuesday night. Apparently, we should all stop deluding ourselves that tougher regulation alone might avoid future crises. If something is too big to fail, then it should be reduced in size. "It is hard to see how the existence of institutions that are "too important to fail" is consistent with their being in the private sector. Encouraging banks to take risks that result in large dividend and remuneration payouts when things go well, and losses for taxpayers when they don't, distorts the allocation of resources and management of risk," King said. He's cooled on the "˜living will' idea, which he now believes would require too much regulatory interference. Instead, the governor favours the simple, radical approach of removing the utility aspects of banking from the casino bits.

4. Fun Fieldday - A judge at the Hamilton District court has ordered a dairy farmer convicted of releasing too much effluent to pay a fine and to hold a series of field days for fellow farmers to talk about his failures, Environment Waikato said in this release on Infonews.co.nz HT Peter Hodge via twitter. I'd love to see Allan Crafar do a few Field Days. Entertaining at the very least.

Offending on one occasion involved the highest level of faecal coliforms in effluent that the judge had ever heard off, while another offence involved "the very highest end of carelessness". Judge Smith said the offending would have had a significant effect on water quality in the area in a number of instances. However, Judge Smith accepted most of the offending was the result of inadequate systems rather than deliberate acts. He set the starting point for an appropriate fine as $60,000, but taking into account a range of factors, including Watson's genuine remorse and financially strained circumstances, the judge ordered that Watson attend up to six farmer field days to speak of his experiences in the hope of deterring others from offending, publish a quarter page apology in the Waitomo News, pay a fine of $3000, plus court costs and a solicitor's fee.

5. Funding gap - Zero Hedge has picked up on a very detailed Bank of International Settlements paper about what the US Federal Reserve did in the wake of the Lehman collapse. Essentially, the US Federal Reserve bailed out the rest of the world's central banks by creating up to US$582 billion of dollar swaps, including a small portion to New Zealand. Apparently, the BIS paper shows that there is a US$6 trillion plus funding gap that is as bad now as before the crisis. It could go bang at any minute. HT Andy Blood via Twitter and Andrew Wilson via email.

Here comes the first estimate ever attempted at quantifying the Fed sponsored "Dollar Destructive" moral hazard: the upper bound of the total loss in the case of a major liquidity event occurring with the Fed's complicit bailout on the table would amount to a staggering $6.5 trillion from a dollar duration funding mismatch alone! This is an astounding, unfathomable and untenable number. Yet it is likely the same now as it was at the onset of the Lehman crisis. In a nutshell what happened is that short-term sources to sustain the massive dollar funding mismatch disappeared virtually overnight, and central banks were suddenly facing a toxic spiral of selling increasingly more worthless assets merely to satisfy currency funding needs in an environment where all of a sudden nobody was willing to provide FX swap lines. So what happens next... The Fed Bails Out The World No, that is not an overstatement: had the Fed not stepped in, the rest of the world (which optimistic pundits tend to forget exists in their bubble view of the US market as the one and only) would have simply collapsed as the $6.5 trillion dollar funding gap closed in on itself, causing a indiscriminate selling off of all dollar denominated assets. The implosion of the basis trade would have seemed like a picnic compared to what was about to ensue had the Fed not stepped in to perpetuate the Fiat banking way of life. Why is this critical? We are now back at a time when the only gains in the stock market are at the expense of dollar destruction, with a concomittant funding for dollar denominated assets. In one short year since the collapse of Lehman we have gone back to the same dollar funding risk exposure as was on the books in these days before Dick Fuld's empire unravelled. While whether or not the Federal Reserve stepped beyond its bounds in practically bailing out not just Goldman Sachs, but as this paper has proven, virtually the entire world, is not up to us to decide. However, a critical topic is: have we learned anything from the implications of an unprecedented dollar funding gap, which is likely back to record levels once again? What is obvious is that the Fed's current policy of a weak dollar, contrary to its repeated lies otherwise, is simply enhancing the dollar funding moral hazard: and the breaking point will come sooner or later with disastrous consequences. As the H.4.1 discloses weekly, the Fed's liquidity swaps are now back to almost zero. This means that foreign Central Banks believe they have the FX swap and dollar maturity situation under control. They thought the same before Lehman blew up. And they were wrong. As the DXY continues tumbling ever lower to fresh 2009 lows, the trade de jour is once again the dollar funding one, although unlike before when the Yen was the carry currency of choice, this time it is the dollar itself, positioning banks for the double whammy of not just a dollar funding shock, but one coupled with a potential massive and historic short squeeze. If and when an exogenous event occurs, not even $6.5 trillion in Fed swap lines will be sufficient to bail out the world economy. It is time someone in Congress asks the Chairman all the pertinent questions that evolve from this analysis and how he is prepared to handle its next, much more vicious, and likely terminal, iteration.

6. The big tradeoff - Matt Nolan at TVHE looks at the comments from Bill English about efficiency vs equity in any decision about increasing the GST. He highlights the tradeoffs nicely.

It will be interesting to see exactly what trade-off the government, and society as a whole, is willing to agree upon.

Spoken like a true economist. 7. Growing outrage - Even the raging righties of the world are getting grumpy about the bonuses about to be showered on the bankers of New York and London. London Mayor Boris Johnson unleashes a salvo in The Torygraph.

Most of the MPs I know seem to be in a state of nervous collapse. Some of them are on suicide watch. Some of them face the task of sacking their wives and selling the house, or possibly the other way round. Some face penury. Never has Parliament been subjected to such protracted humiliation at the hands of the people. Then look at the bankers, the bankers whose high-rolling risk-taking triggered the recession that has so exacerbated public rage at MPs. The bankers seem to be waltzing off with a song on their lips and their hands in their pockets "“ at least, their hands would be in their pockets if they were not stuffed with money. And when I say stuffed, I mean bulging, bursting, ballooning with the biggest bonuses you ever saw. London estate agents say they cannot believe the wheelbarrows of dosh that are suddenly crashing through their doors. Savills says the number of buyers from the financial services sector has risen by 48 per cent in the third quarter of this year, purely in the expectation of yet another ginormous Christmas bonus. A knuckle-cracking realtor in Knight Frank's Kensington office says he has never seen anything like it: email after email from the boys and girls at Goldman Sachs. "We did our first Goldman's deal in June," he tells the FT, "and we are now doing five times as many for its employees as for any other bank." George Osborne dropped the hint of a windfall tax in his conference speech. Now, Labour is said to be planning some act of confiscation. How can any politician be expected to oppose such measures, when the banks refuse to learn? If they act now, if they show they understand, if they direct those bonuses now to the good of society, they may be able to avert their comeuppance in the form of tax or regulation. And it is absolutely no use their complaining that they are all paying a price for the bad behaviour of a few: believe me, that is exactly what the MPs think. There may be time to avert a windfall tax, but time is fast running out.

8. We're rich and poor - The problem is New Zealand has an enormous gap between rich and poor. This piece in BusinessWeek from Bruce Einhorn points out that the UN Development Programme has worked out that New Zealand is the 6th most unequal developed economy in the world. Our inquality has increased the most in the world in the last 20 years. Britain is number 7 and Australia is number 9. I wonder whether a large part of this is that over the last decade the richest New Zealanders have avoided paying tax and have benefited most from the property boom. HT Andrew Wilson via email

No. 6 New Zealand Gini score: 36.2 GDP 2007 (US$ billions): 135.7 Share of income or expenditure (%) Poorest 10%: 2.2 Richest 10%: 27.8 Ratio of income or expenditure, share of top 10% to lowest 10%: 12.5 According to the OECD, New Zealand had the biggest rise in inequality among member nations in the two decades starting in the mid-1980s. The country's economy emerged from recession in the second quarter, but with growth of just 0.1%, the central bank is likely to keep interest rates low until well into 2010.

9. Turd in the punchbowl -  Mish over at Global Economic Analysis carries a useful summary of the shellacking that Ben Bernanke got in Congress. It seems that Bernanke has forgotten how he threatened to get rid of Bank of America's management. Also, it seems, then Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson (a former Goldman CEO) described Bank of America the 'turd in the punchbowl'. Eeyeeww. HT Andrew Wilson.

When it comes to memory loss, there is virtually no chance that Bernanke could have forgotten a conversation with Fed Governor Lacker in which Bernanke planned to tell Bank of America that "management is gone". That is not the kind of conversation that anyone forgets, except on purpose. With that in mind "Elective Memory Loss" is a more fitting term.

10. 50 different kinds of stupid - Eric Crampton at Offsetting Behaviour has a rip-roaring look at how our government is subsidising the Rugby World Cup. He does not agree with the approach. Neither do I. Why should taxpayers subsidise the first class travel and gin swilling of a bunch of old dodderers at the International Rugby Board?

As is usual when countries have to bid for events, we promised all kinds of inefficient investments in stadiums from Dunedin to Auckland. These investments neverever ever pay off. They're always a massive waste. The economic literature is overwhelming. Folks here will say "Oh, but here it'll be different". They're wrong. The stadium investments will not pay off. Most of this funding comes from local councils (we're expanding the stadium here in Christchurch), but the national government is kicking in some money for some of the stadiums as well. So I'm paying for Rugby through income tax contributions to stadium development. But it doesn't end there. Read on and weep. Two weeks ago, it emerged that the government-owned and heavily subsidized Maori Television station had put forward the largest bid for Rugby World Cup broadcasting rights. Somewhere around three million dollars. So I was to be paying for rugby at stadiums where I wouldn't attend games and for television broadcasts I wouldn't be watching. But at least it was going to be on a station I don't currently get, so it wouldn't be displacing any shows that I do watch. Then last week the government encouraged a bidding war for broadcasting rights between the different state owned broadcasters where they'd each get a big government subsidy to bid against each other. This is fifty different kinds of stupid.