Top 10 at 10: Rate cutting over in Oz; Call for RBNZ intervention; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 am. I welcome your additions in the comments below. Please send any suggestions for tomorrow's Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz I don't say 'cha ching' ever. 1. The Australian reported RBA Governor Glenn Stevens warned Australia's banks to prepare for the end of the government guarantee for wholesale funding, as overseas counterparts pull back from the policy.

Australian banks have raised up to $100 billion using the guarantee, launched in October. Most of that has been raised by the top four institutions, which can use the policy at a cheaper rate than their junior rivals. However, the number of unguaranteed deals has slowed since National Australia Bank became the first to carry out an offshore non-guaranteed deal in May, when it raised pound stg. 500 million in Britain. "For their part, banks will need to reduce their reliance on the extended guarantees and stand on their own feet before too much longer," Mr Stevens said. "The banks of the US and Europe are starting down this path on their wholesale issuance, having recognised that it is in their own interests to do so.

2. BERL Economist Ganensh Nana has called on the Reserve Bank to intervene in the currency market to bring down the New Zealand dollar, the Dom Post reports. TVHE's Matt Nolan disagrees with Nana in this post, saying the high NZ$ is the result of a number of factors, and that it is a sympton, not a cause of where we are now.

"The exchange rate is just so wrong it is way out of kilter with what the real production side of the economy needs," Mr Nana said, suggesting the dollar should be under US55c. The Reserve Bank is expected to keep the official cash rate steady at 2.5 per cent, but Mr Nana said it should act now on the currency. There was nothing to lose by bringing the currency down, and saying where it should be, he said. In past recessions, a low kiwi dollar had helped spark an economic recovery. This time, the US dollar remained weak, but international financial markets were ignoring signs that there should be a weak New Zealand dollar.

3. Privacy law researcher Gehan Gunasekara from Auckland University has an interesting take on VedaAdvantage's push towards positive or comprehensive credit reporting in an Op-Ed in the NZHerald

Rather than rewarding those with a good credit history, it seems likely that a system of comprehensive credit reporting will instead enable the targeting of those who are good credit risks to obtain further credit. This may boost the profits of lenders, but will do little for society at large in reducing its indebtedness. In New Zealand, it is as well that those who monitor our credit rating are themselves under the scrutiny of the Privacy Commissioner. The privacy authorities here and in Australia are conducting a review of credit reporting, and we await the outcome with interest..

4. ProvencoCadmus is in deep trouble, the NZHerald reported. 5. The debate over high frequency 'flash' trading (HFT) techniques used by the likes of Goldman 'Vampire Squid' Sachs is gaining momentum, Felix Salmon points out in nice rounded piece. This story will run and run.

Essentially, HFT turns out to be one of those "financial innovations" which lots of people like in theory but which only seem to benefit financial-market professionals in practice. I, for one, don't think that there's $20 billion worth of net societal benefit to it.

6. Oh dear. How sad. Never mind. BusinessWeek says Baby-boomer brands like Mercedes and various cruise ship firms will struggle as US boomers stop spending. Will it happen here too?

This year, Mercedes will sell a third fewer cars in America. In Montvale, N.J., Kristi Steinberg, who runs Benz's North American market research operation, has a nagging fear: that sales won't recover for a long time because boomers, history's wealthiest generation, are tapped out. "I don't know if anyone knows yet if this is a blip," she says, "or a defining moment like the Great Depression." Executives such as Steinberg always knew boomers would curb their free-spending ways as they approached retirement. But not in their most nightmarish imaginings could they have predicted that an economic maelstrom would cripple the customers they have courted and counted on for 30 years.

7. This is what happens when stressed out borrowers simply give up and default. This New York Times piece is interesting on the this growing phenomena in the United States. Maybe there's no shame or debtors are simply exhausted.

Those on the front lines of the debt industry say there is a small but increasingly noticeable group of strapped consumers who are deciding they will simply stop paying. After loading up on debt eagerly provided by the card companies during the boom times, these people now find themselves trapped in an endless cycle where they are charged interest on interest and fees upon fees while the lenders get government bailouts. They are upset "” at the unyielding banks and often at their free-spending selves "” and are pre-emptively defaulting. They could continue to pay for a while longer but instead are walking away. "You reach a point where you embrace the darkness of default," said Adam Levin, chairman of the financial products Web site Credit.com.

8. Michael 'Liars Poker' Lewis 'debunks' some the thoughts around at the moment about Goldman Sachs in a Bloomberg column

Rumor No. 2: "When the U.S. government bailed out AIG, and paid off its gambling debts, it saved not AIG but Goldman Sachs." The charge isn't merely insulting but ignorant. Less responsible journalists continue to bring up the $12.9 billion we received from AIG, as if that was some kind of big deal to us. But as our CFO David Viniar explained back in March, we were hedged. Our profits from AIG "rounded to zero." People who don't work at Goldman Sachs, of course, find this implausible: How could $12.9 billion round to zero? Easy, but you just need to understand the mathematics. Let's assume AIG transferred $12,880,560,250.34 of taxpayer money to Goldman Sachs. A Goldman outsider, asked to round this number, might call it $12,880,560,250.00. That's not how we look at it; at Goldman we always round to the nearest $50 billion, so anything less than $25 billion rounds to zero.

9. US trucking volumes are still falling, calling into question the 'green shootists' out there, Calculated Risk points out. 10. Remember the election debate worm? The Onion with this piece on economic commentators. I don't think I would do too well. New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time