Top 10 at 10: NZ's debt mountain; 'Don't blame cows for climate change'; The Aussie boom gets bigger; Dilbert; Gorilla school

Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 to 12. I welcome your additions and comments below or please send suggestions for Tuesday’s Top 10 at 10 to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz I'll be off on Friday and Monday. Happy Easter to all. Even Catbert. 1. Mountain of debt - Brian Fallow has an excellent column in the NZHerald highlighting the IMF's warning about NZ household foreign debt and how we face higher interest rates. He is dead right.

Net external debt of 90 per cent of GDP is conspicuously high by international standards. We have got away with it so far in part because almost all of it is private-sector obligations, much of it held by the banks and backed by vanilla mortgages. But with the Government having switched from saving to debt accumulation, and with household savings rates still negative, the increase in Crown debt will have to be funded by foreign savers. Competition for their funds will be fierce, from larger governments with bigger deficits to finance and higher credit ratings, and increasingly from corporate borrowers as the world recovery gathers momentum. Bond yields are bound to rise and the combination of mounting debt and higher interest rates will pre-empt a growing share of future tax revenues.

2. 'You have been warned' -  The bond vigilantes are out in force. Now the world's biggest bond fund has told Britain to pull up its socks 'or else'. The US bond fund PIMCO has warned that Britain risks a vicious circle of rising debt costs as global investors raise long term bond yields to protect against inflation, the Daily Telegraph reports. HT Andrew via email.

Bill Gross, the fund's chief and emminence grise of bond vigilantes, said the UK was on its list of "must avoid" countries along with Greece and others in eurozone's Club Med. The flood of British debt is likely to "lead to inflationary conditions and a depreciating currency", lowering the return on bonds. "If that view becomes consensus, then at some point the UK may fail to attain escape velocity from its debt trap," he wrote in his April monthly note.

3. 'The money's safe' - The first rule in white collar crime is to make sure the wife is happy. Stern Hu, the Rio Tinto executive convicted of taking bribes this, appears now to have been deserted by former backers at Rio Tinto and in Australia. His wife seems less than sympathetic too. The Australian reports she blabbed to the Chinese authorities.

STERN Hu brought two bribes of 1 million yuan and $US300,000 from private Chinese steel mills back to his Shanghai home and put the money in the family safe, his wife, Zhu Xiaoli, told police in evidence presented at the trial of the Australian Rio Tinto executive, now jailed for 10 years. A 70-page written verdict from the court, a copy of which has been obtained by The Australian, raises questions about the extent of corruption in Rio's Shanghai office.

4. An ugly picture - This chart from dshort.com shows how America's tax rates have been cut since the early 1980s and how America's public debt has exploded since then. I'm not sure the two are directly linked but it sure makes for an interesting chart. This version shows the real linear version, but those who want log, real log and other versions can click through from the chart.

5. Downgraded - Moody's has downgraded five Greek banks because of the nation's growing fiscal and economic problems, the Telegraph reported. The fat lady has yet to sing that Greece (and the Eurozone) is safe. With Greece's bond yields rising, there's a real risk of a meltdown in the next couple of months as it tries to issue over 20 billion euros in debt. The IMF and the Eurozone are still squabbling over any bailout package.

Moody's said it downgraded their deposit and debt ratings due "to a weakening in the banks' stand-alone financial strength and anticipated additional pressures stemming from the country's challenging economic prospects in the foreseeable future." It named the banks as the National Bank of Greece, EFG Eurobank Ergasias, Alpha Bank, Piraeus Bank and Emporiki Bank of Greece.

6. Now it's gone rural - The credit-fueled housing boom in China has spread from the cities into rural areas, Caixin Online reports. If it's spreading into the boondocks in China, some of it will slop over into China's southern province of Australia and its suburb New Zealand. HT Troy via email.

This year's legislative sessions of the National People's Congress and the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference failed to produce the kinds of government curbs for real estate sought by many consumers concerned about affordable housing and economists who've warned about runaway property bubbles. Meanwhile, many developers reacted to the legislative inaction by finding more reason to tap real estate markets in smaller cities and turn away from China's sprawling first-tier cities – Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Shenzhen – where soaring prices have crimped business opportunities for all but the industry's dominant "land kings." Developer interest in second-, third- and fourth-tier cities also rose a notch shortly after the legislative sessions ended when, on March 15, three state-owned developers broke land auction records with the highest bids ever in Beijing, offering a combined 12 billion yuan for three building sites.

Yet the authorities are battling to try to shut the boom down by edict.

Another market twist came three days later, when the State-owned Assets and Supervision Commission (SASAC) said it had been "forced" to issue "emergency orders" to 78 state-owned enterprises (SOEs), telling them to abandon the property business. SASAC Director Li Rongrong gave the companies, for which real estate is not a focus, 15 business days to begin an orderly exit.

7. I love charts - Here's one I found on GraphJam. HT Gertraud via email. see more Funny Graphs 8. Those bloody lucky Australians - Brazil's Vale and Australia's BHP Billiton have done a deal this week that changes the way iron ore prices are negotiated. It means the lucky country is about to make a lot more money and steel prices may rise globally, the FT.com reports. This, of course, is good for us and bad for us. Wages, particularly in Australian mining, will rise and some of that cash will overflow to us. Meanwhile, demand for workers over there will increase. Your view?

Global steel prices are set to leap by up to a third, pushing up the cost of everyday goods from cars to domestic appliances, after miners and steelmakers on Tuesday agreed a ground-breaking change in the iron ore price system. The deal by Vale of Brazil and Anglo-Australian BHP Billiton with Japanese and Chinese mills marks the end of the 40-year-old benchmark system of annual contracts and lengthy price negotiations. The industry instead agreed to move to quarterly contracts linked to the nascent iron ore spot market. “The benchmark system has ended. There is no comeback,” said a senior mining executive directly involved in the talks. The world’s top ore miners stand to profit hugely in the short term from the new price system. One executive estimated that the profits of the big three producers, Vale, Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton, would be boosted by at least $5bn this year. The new price system will lift the cost of iron ore to Asian steelmakers to about $110-$120 a tonne during the April-June period, up between 80 and 100 per cent from the $60 level at which the 2009-10 annual contracts were settled.

9. Meaty story? - I've missed this little controversy over the last couple of days, but it has burbled away overseas and is important in the food miles debate that New Zealand's farmers get hammered with in Europe in particular. One of the claims used by the Food Milers is that the meat industry produces more greenhouse gases than the transport industry and that the two together are appalling. They cite research from a UN Food and Agriculture report from 2006 called 'Livestock's Long Shadow". Now a US researcher called Frank Mitloehner (who has received funding from the beef industry) has challenged the claims, arguing apples were being compared with oranges because the meat calculation included effects up and down the chain, while the transport one didn't. Here's a summary of the debate at CJR. Unfortunately the debate has some of the tone of the wider Climate Warming debate: name calling and polarisation aplenty. But it's still worth knowing about. Here's a link to the Mitloehner paper that the story is based on and the UC Davis news release titled "Don't blame cows for climate change."

Mitloehner traces much of the public confusion over meat and milk’s role in climate change to two sentences in a 2006 United Nations report, titled "Livestock's Long Shadow." Printed only in the report's executive summary and nowhere in the body of the report, the sentences read: “The livestock sector is a major player, responsible for 18 percent of greenhouse gas emissions measured in CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents). This is a higher share than transport.” These statements are not accurate, yet their wide distribution through news media have put us on the wrong path toward solutions, Mitloehner says. "We certainly can reduce our greenhouse-gas production, but not by consuming less meat and milk. "Rather, in developed countries, we should focus on cutting our use of oil and coal for electricity, heating and vehicle fuels." Mitloehner said leading authorities agree that, in the U.S., raising cattle and pigs for food accounts for about 3 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions, while transportation creates an estimated 26 percent.

10. Totally irrelevant video - This one appealed to my outlook on life (just kidding). A team of researchers have successfully taught a Gorilla about the concept of eventual certain death. Thanks to the Onion for picking up on this.... On that cheery pre-Easter note, catch you all on Tuesday. Scientists Successfully Teach Gorilla It Will Die Someday