Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and comments below or please send suggestions for Monday's Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz We are very culturally sensitive (about landlords) at interest.co.nz 
1. Obama grows a pair - If only he'd done this a year ago. US President Barack Obama announced plans overnight to break up the 'Too Big to Fail' banks and restrict them from riskier proprietary trading. It seems the loss of Ted Kennedy's seat in Congress has got the message through to him and passed his gatekeepers that American taxpayers are furious about the massive bailouts of public money given to banks. D'oh. Gillian Tett at the FT.com captures the mood best with this piece, which compares banks to the fluid metal villain in Terminator II. Just when you thought they were dead, they're back.
It is not hard to understand why this has happened. Blame it, if you like, on the "plastic pitchfork" threat. In the last 48 hours, or since the Democratic party suffered a shock defeat in Massachusetts, e-mails have been circulating among key Democratic party support groups demanding that the Obama administration aggressively clamp down on the banking world, to regain voter trust. Or, as one influential mass e-mail I have seen puts it, some Democratic funders have threatened to start demonstrating with "pitchforks (plastic!)" "“ unless the government showed that it was willing to take on the banks. Faced with that threat, which is merely the tip of a wider iceberg of voter anger, the Obama administration has acted; no doubt it now hopes that the pitchforks will vanish "“ or be directed.
Obama's problem now is he has to get it past a senate where he has lost control, thanks to his own bad decisions to appoint Tim Geithner and Larry Summers, and to reappoint Ben Bernanke. I said quite early last year that Obama was a liar and a fool for promising change but sticking with Bush's economic policies. He seems to have finally worked out Americans don't like donating their cash to make bankers in Manhattan wealthy. He also seems finally to be listening to former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker (a hero to many including me), who Obama appointed as an advisor and then studiously ignored for the first year. Volcker has been calling for smaller, simpler banks for 18 months. Obama even called plans to stop banks from proprietary trading the 'Volcker rule' in his full remarks. Here's the transcript. HT Kevin. A pity. It's too late for Obama now. He is a lame duck President and that will be confirmed after the mid-term elections on the first Tuesday in November.
2. Lobbyists win - I regularly criticise the influence of corporate lobbyists on US policy making, particularly around trade. It's why I'm very wary of a free trade agreement with the US. It would just open the door for pharmaceutical and studio lobbyists to monster Pharmac and our internet freedoms. Now the US Supreme Court has just overturned a set of campaign finance reforms that would have restricted corporations from spending lots of money to influence Congress. Obama will now find it even harder to get his health care and financial reforms through. A lot of New Zealanders don't understand just how pervasive and powerful corporate lobbyists (named K street after where lobbying firms are based) are in America. Here's an earlier story I did on why an FTA with America is a bad idea. I love free trade, just not free trade with corrupt policymakers. Here's the New York Times story to give readers an idea of how momentous this decision is.
Sweeping aside a century-old understanding and overruling two important precedents, a bitterly divided Supreme Court on Thursday ruled that the government may not ban political spending by corporations in candidate elections. The ruling was a vindication, the majority said, of the First Amendment's most basic free speech principle "” that the government has no business regulating political speech. The dissenters said allowing corporate money to flood the political marketplace will corrupt democracy. The 5-to-4 decision was a doctrinal earthquake but also a political and practical one. Specialists in campaign finance law said they expected the decision, which also applies to labor unions and other organizations, to reshape the way elections are conducted.
3. Going the other way - Meanwhile, Australia has ruled out any introduction of a tax on banks, hoping to attract bankers to Australia's fair shores, Bloomberg reported. So maybe the Geneva of the South Pacific will be in Sydney?
The higher taxes planned for financial services firms in the U.S. and in the U.K., home to the biggest bailouts by taxpayers, are an opportunity for Australia, the country's minister for financial services, Chris Bowen, said in an interview with Bloomberg Television today. "We're not going down that road at all," Bowen said, referring to higher taxes on bonuses for bankers, in the interview in Hong Kong. "We don't see we have those sorts of issues." Australia needs fewer rules and lower taxes on overseas investors and financial institutions to become a financial center, the Australian Financial Centre Forum said in a Jan. 15 report. Bowen said today he "got that message loud and clear," amid competition from cities including Singapore and Hong Kong. "The key word is certainty," said Bowen. "So people getting Australians to manage their funds or investing in Australia know upfront what the tax treatment is going to be."
4. So damn hot - China's GDP grew at an annualised rate of 10.7% and the economy is now in danger of overheating unless the central bank and the government slam on the brakes by slowing lending growth and raising interest rates, BusinessWeek reported. Inflation is heating up. This is a worry for the rest of the world because China is now the engine room for growth globally, given America is faltering into what looks like a double-dip recession.
Inflation accelerated to a more-than-forecast 1.9 percent in December and gross domestic product climbed 10.7 percent, the National Bureau of Statistics said in Beijing yesterday. Since October, policy makers have said managing inflation expectations is one of the government's central objectives. "The impression that strong inflation is back clearly matters to officials seeking to dampen rising inflation expectations," said Mark Williams, an economist at Capital Economics Ltd. in London who worked at the U.K. Treasury as an adviser on China from 2005 to 2007. Officials will also allow the yuan to appreciate after holding it unchanged since July 2008 to aid exporters, yesterday's survey showed. The yuan will increase about 3 percent by the end of this year against the dollar.
5. China's muscle flexing - This is an old article by Mark Lynas in The Guardian from December 22 in the immediate aftermath of the failure of global warning talks in Copenhagen. It's worth pointing to now because it is useful 'fly on the wall' reportage of how China monstered the developed world to gut any concrete moves to control carbon emissions. It's one of those slow burning (pun intended) stories. As China's economy grows (it's now the world's biggest exporter and its 2nd biggest economy) its political power is growing. This was an interesting demonstration of that power. Can we trust China? Google (another large nation state) has decided not. I wonder.
Copenhagen was a disaster. That much is agreed. But the truth about what actually happened is in danger of being lost amid the spin and inevitable mutual recriminations. The truth is this: China wrecked the talks, intentionally humiliated Barack Obama, and insisted on an awful "deal" so western leaders would walk away carrying the blame. How do I know this? Because I was in the room and saw it happen. What I saw was profoundly shocking. The Chinese premier, Wen Jinbao, did not deign to attend the meetings personally, instead sending a second-tier official in the country's foreign ministry to sit opposite Obama himself. The diplomatic snub was obvious and brutal, as was the practical implication: several times during the session, the world's most powerful heads of state were forced to wait around as the Chinese delegate went off to make telephone calls to his "superiors". To those who would blame Obama and rich countries in general, know this: it was China's representative who insisted that industrialised country targets, previously agreed as an 80% cut by 2050, be taken out of the deal. "Why can't we even mention our own targets?" demanded a furious Angela Merkel. Australia's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, was annoyed enough to bang his microphone. Brazil's representative too pointed out the illogicality of China's position. Why should rich countries not announce even this unilateral cut? The Chinese delegate said no, and I watched, aghast, as Merkel threw up her hands in despair and conceded the point. Now we know why "“ because China bet, correctly, that Obama would get the blame for the Copenhagen accord's lack of ambition.
6. Henry's higher taxes - The Tax Working Group and the government are watching the Henry review across the Tasman very closely for signs of corporate tax cuts. Treasury Secretary Ken Henry came out yesterday with a speech saying the government would actually have to raise more (not less) taxes in future to pay for baby boomer pensions and health costs. This surprised a few people, including Peter Martin at The Age. HT Keith Ng via Twitter.
Treasury boss Ken Henry has dashed expectations that his review of the tax system will pave the way for lower tax, declaring that over time Australians will have to pay more. Addressing a conference in Sydney, Dr Henry said Australia's tax system had to be prepared for the probability that, as the population ages, government revenue needs ''will grow strongly in the longer term''. ''Generally, older people demand a lot more from governments, especially in health and aged care services,'' Dr Henry said.
7. 'Command China vs Network China' - Thomas Friedman at the New York Times makes an interesting argument around Internet freedom in China in the wake of the Google kerfuffle and how there are now two Chinas. They are: 'Command China', which includes the government', and 'Network China', which includes those internationally networked companies on the coast and down south. Friedman sees an inevitable clash that will be lost by Command China.
This is a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China. What is so important about knowledge flows? This, for me, is the key to understanding the Google story and why one might decide to short the Chinese Communist Party. John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released "Shift Index" that we're in the midst of "The Big Shift." We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks "” the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace "” into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledgeflows, which are constantly being renewed. "Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important," says Hagel. "Since there are far more smart people outside any one organization than inside." And in today's flat world, you can now access them all. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don't, others will. I would argue that Command China, in its efforts to suppress, curtail and channel knowledge flows into politically acceptable domains that will indefinitely sustain the control of the Communist Party "” i.e., censoring Google "” is increasingly at odds with Network China, which is thriving by participating in global knowledge flows. That is what the war over Google is really all about: It is a proxy and a symbol for whether the Chinese will be able to freely search and connect wherever their imaginations and creative impulses take them, which is critical for the future of Network China.
8. The Dark Bailout - The Joker is not happy with George Bush's plan to bail out the banks... 9. Get up, stand up, standup for your heart - Get up from your computer now and jump around. Some Australian research out this month shows that people who sit around watching television (or on their computers) for hours on end are much more likely to die early of cardiovascular disease.
Australian researchers who tracked 8,800 people for an average of six years found that those who said they watched TV for more than four hours a day were 46% more likely to die of any cause and 80% more likely to die of cardiovascular disease than people who reported spending less than two hours a day in front of the tube. Time spent in front of televisions and computers and playing videogames has come under fire in studies in recent years for contributing to an epidemic of obesity in the U.S. and around the world. But typically the resulting public-health message urges children and adults to put down the Xbox controller and remote and get on a treadmill or a soccer field. The Australian study offers a different take. "It's not the sweaty type of exercise we're losing," says David Dunstan, a researcher at Baker IDI Heart and Diabetes Institute, Melbourne, who led the study. "It's the incidental moving around, walking around, standing up and utilizing muscles that [doesn't happen] when we're plunked on a couch in front of a television." Indeed, participants in the study reported getting between 30 and 45 minutes of exercise a day, on average. The results are supported by an emerging field of research that shows how prolonged periods of inactivity can affect the body's processing of fats and other substances that contribute to heart risk. And they suggest that people can help mitigate such risk simply by avoiding extended periods of sitting.
10. Totally irrelevant video - It's 'snow joke' (ho ho ho) for a bunch of British policeman reprimanded for using their riot shields as makeshift sleds while skiving off work as traffic police on snowy roads.
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