Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and suggestions in the comments below or please send suggestions for Tuesday's Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz We spend no time explaining the obvious...and we are all drama queens here... 
1. Chrisco trouble - Rob Stock at the Sunday Star Times reports on some legal troubles that Chrisco founder Richard Bradley is having with a finance company linked to the big Christmas savings scheme provider. All very smoky. Bradley is also trying to sell his mansion.
Sources close to the case say the claim for around $8 million is against Chrisco's owner Hats Holdings, understood to be associated with Bradley, which was one of two partners in finance company Hopscotch Money. Hopscotch launched in May 2005 in a blaze of advertising and aimed to market personal loans to Chrisco's huge customer base, with most of its funding coming from major banks. It has since all-but vanished from the public eye and it appears the partners are no longer on good terms. The claim is being taken by the shareholders of Opus Fintek, a holding company majority owned by brothers Greg and Robert Symons, which was the other partner in Hopscotch.
2. Brave new (old) world - Graham Bowley at the New York Times explains how 'Bailout Nation' is creating a new golden era of wealth on Wall St. This story is starting to a get a run on in America. It is now extending beyond the blogs and into the mainstream. How long before the masses revolt?
Even as the economy continues to struggle, much of Wall Street is minting money "” and looking forward again to hefty bonuses, The New York Times's Graham Bowley reports. Many Americans wonder how this can possibly be. How can some banks be prospering so soon after a financial collapse, even as legions of people worry about losing their jobs and their homes? It may come as a surprise that one of the most powerful forces driving the resurgence on Wall Street is not the banks but Washington. Many of the steps that policy makers took last year to stabilize the financial system "” reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions' debts "” helped set the stage for this new era of Wall Street wealth.
3. Wile E. Coyote - BusinessWeek's Peter Coy looks at what would happen if the US dollar were to collapse. It's not a pretty picture. "Trade wars could break out. Overexposed banks might collapse. And that's just for starters" One commentator talks about the US dollar having already run off the cliff and now its legs are spinning in mid air just before the drop.
This state of calm would vanish overnight, though, if the financial markets got a sense that the dollar's decline was starting to snowball out of control. At that point, the invisible "force field" protecting the dollar would fade away, says Martin D. Weiss, chairman of Weiss Group, a financial data and analysis firm in Jupiter, Fla. Says Weiss: "We would become more like ordinary mortals and more vulnerable to attacks on our currency." The bearish case for the dollar is that the decline takes on a life of its own. Selling begets more selling. The world's central bankers and finance ministers intervene to prop up the currency, but speculators, having tasted victory, aren't scared off. Princeton University economist Paul R. Krugman once called this the Wile E. Coyote scenario, after the character in the Road Runner cartoons who runs off a cliff but doesn't start to fall until he looks down and sees there's nothing beneath his feet.
4. 'Like Martha F***ing Stewart' - American authorities have uncovered what they say is the biggest insider trading scandal in the not-so-fledgling history of hedge funds, reports FT.com. Sri Lankan-born hedge fund billionaire Raja Rajaratnam has been accused of insider trading that earned him a profit of US$20 million. Wire taps were involved. Sounds like a script from The Sopranos.
Chiesi: "You just gotta trust me on this. Here's how scared I am about what I'm gonna tell you on AMD"¦September"¦I swear to you in front of God"¦You put me in jail if you talk"¦I'm dead if this leaks. I really am"¦and my career is over. I'll be like Martha F**king Stewart"¦" Rajaratnam: "I think you should buy and sell, and buy and sell"¦On Akamai or IBM, anything, be radio silent. Like, you know, I get shit on lots of companies"¦"
5. 'Kill the octopus' - Frank Rich (great name for a financial commentator) writes in the New York Times about the comparisons between John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil at the turn of the last century and Goldman Sachs at the turn of this century. This wide-ranging essay gets the US zeitgeist perfectly. Rich essentially says Barack Obama doesn't have the balls to do to Goldman what Teddy Roosevelt did to Standard. HT Arie Dekker via email.
Goldman is this century's octopus "” almost literally so. The most-quoted sentence in financial journalism this year, by Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, describes the company as a "great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money." That's why Goldman's chief executive, Lloyd Blankfein, recycled Rockefeller's stunt last week: The announcement of Goldman's spectacular third-quarter earnings ($3.19 billion) was paired with the news that the company was donating $200 million to its own foundation, which promotes education. In Goldman dollars, that largess is roughly comparable to the nickels John D. handed out to children a century ago. At least those kids could spend the spare change on candy.
6. Rising Yuan? - Bloomberg reports that Yuan forwards rose sharply on Friday in anticipation that the Chinese authorities would allow the Yuan to edge higher against the US dollar. HT David via IM.
China's yuan forwards had the biggest weekly gain in more than six months on speculation the central bank will allow appreciation as exports and inflation pick up.
The U.S. Treasury Department yesterday criticized China for the "lack of flexibility" in the yuan and a buildup of foreign-exchange reserves, while stopping short of branding the nation a currency manipulator. China's exports declined 15.2 percent in September from a year earlier, the least in nine months, the government reported this week.
"Given the recovering Chinese economy and the return of inflation, China will need to allow the currency to appreciate," said Nizam Idris, a strategist at UBS AG in Singapore. The yuan will probably appreciate 5 percent to 6.5 against the dollar in 2010, he said.
7. 'Full blown depression' - There are still some who believe the global recession will turn into a full blown depression because all the money printing and injections have done is benefit Wall St, rather than Main St.
This global recession will turn into a "full-blown depression," Nicu Harajchi, CEO of N1 Asset Management, said Friday, adding that global stimulus hasn't come down to Main Street. Wall Street is making money, while consumers aren't, Harajchi told CNBC. "We have seen the G20 coming out with cross border capital injections of $5 trillion this year"¦ But a lot of this money hasn't really come down to Main Street," he said. "When it comes down to corporate America, corporate Europe or even in Asia, in Japan, we are not seeing Main Street making any money," he said. "Consumers are losing their jobs. They are struggling with their mortgages, with their credit. And we are just seeing this continuing." The $5 trillion injection is "monetary expansion," according to Harajchi. "At some point, which we believe to be 2010/11, some of the central banks are going to recall some of that money and that will turn from monetary expansion to monetary contraction." He also said he doesn't see the corporates or the public "being able to pay back that debt." "We see 2010 becoming a much more risky year than 2009," he said.
8. Myths busted - Kent Cherny and Yuliya Demyanyk from the excellent VoxEu puncture a bunch of myths about the US sub-prime crisis, including whether underwriting standards were worse and whether people were using their homes as ATMS. Well worth a read.
Many of the myths presented here single out some characteristic of subprime loans, subprime borrowers, or the economic circumstances in which those loans were made as the cause of the crisis. All of these factors are certainly important for borrowers with subprime mortgages in terms of their ability to keep their homes and make regular mortgage payments. But no single factor is responsible for the subprime failure.
In hindsight, the subprime crisis fits neatly into the classic lending boom and bust story "“ subprime mortgage lending experienced a remarkable boom, during which the market expanded almost sevenfold over six years. In each of these years between 2001 and 2007, the quality of mortgages was deteriorating, their overall riskiness was increasing, and the pricing of this riskiness was decreasing (see Demyanyk and Van Hemert 2008). For years, rising house prices concealed the subprime mortgage market's underlying weaknesses and unsustainability. When this veil was finally pulled away by a nationwide contraction in prices, the true quality of the loans was revealed in a vast wave of delinquencies and foreclosures that continues to destabilise the US housing market even today.
9. 'Hole in the sand' - This BBC video on YouTube on the property bust in Dubai is compelling. The opening pictures of an abandoned suburb are evocative. HT Gertraud 
10. Economic nostradamus - Fred Harrison, who wrote a book in 2007 called Boom Bust: House Prices, Banking and the Depression of 2010, warned Gordon Brown in 1997 about the coming crash of 2010. Harrison is the research director of Land Research Trust. This video details Brown's cover up. "Brown as Prime Minister is now throwing other peoples money at a problem that he allowed to happen and is engaged in a cover up to protect his reputation," Harrison says. HT Gertraud
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