Thursday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: John Key's huuuge specs; 'Stealing' from Lombard; Australia's boomtowns; Dilbert

Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 past 4 pm, brought to you in association with New Zealand Mint for your reading pleasure.

I welcome your additions and comments below, or please send suggestions for Thursday's Top 10 at 10 via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

Remember that registered commenters can more easily include links out in their comments. Use the box in the right hand column to register. We're turning off unregistered comments from September 12.

I'll pop any surplus suggestions I get into the comment stream under the Top 10.

1. 'It was so cheap we almost stole it' - Remember Lombard Finance?

It was the Wellington-based property financier that imploded under the weight of its European sports car driving CEO Michael Reeves and former National big wig Chairman Doug Graham.

Now the Brooklyn Rise townhouse development that was its biggest exposure has been sold to two very happy chaps. Here's Hank Schouten at the Dom Post with this rollicking yarn.

A developer and a real estate agent borrowed some money to buy the development for 6% of the amount Lombard lent to the project. They're thrilled.

Lombard Finance investors may not be.

A big part of the trouble-plagued Brooklyn Rise housing development, on which Lombard Finance is owed more than $40 million, has been sold by Lombard's receiver for just $2.25m. And the delighted buyers – developer John Mouroukis and his real estate agent partner Peter Barzukas – are set to recoup almost all their investment within a few months just by finishing off and selling six nearly complete houses.

Ironically, the aversion that bankers now have to investing in distressed property helped the pair pick it up for what looks like a bargain.

"I don't want to say I stole it, but what helped was that there is no money available from the banks, so we got it for a very attractive price," Mr Mouroukis said.

It took four months to raise the money and he had to get it from a second-tier lender – a finance company.

2. Did Forsyth Barr do very well? - Forsyth Barr are the Dunedin based investment banking and broking operation that recommended many investors put their money into South Canterbury Finance and were also advising Allan Hubbard on the potential sale of the Timaru finance company near the end.

There are now questions about how much Forbarr knew about the very lucrative opportunity to buy South Canterbury bonds cheaply and then be paid back in full by the government almost immediately. James Weir has the story in the DomPost. Forsyth Barr deny any wrongdoing.

There would have been a killing in the NZ$125m tranche of SCF bonds that expired after the guarantee in December 2012, which were selling at 73c with a face value of $1 recently. Anyone who bought at 73c will get a payout of $1, which a source said was a "spectacular return" in a short time.

Market sources pointed out that Forsyth Barr's custodian companies for investors appeared to have bought millions of South Canterbury bonds between the end of June and the end of July, according to market trading figures.

However, Forsyth Barr's Mr Paviour-Smith said that while the figures appeared "intriguing", they were not right. There was little change between the holdings at the end of May and the end of July. In other words, the June figures "appeared to be in error", he said.

"It is curious and frustrating and it is misleading." It appeared Forsyth Barr did some "smart buying", getting the bonds at a big discount and then getting the government bailout to make the investment up to $1, but that was wrong. "We just have not been active buying millions of bonds in these securities," Mr Paviour-Smith said. Any actual changes were "pretty small".

3. 'Oops. Cover up the papers Sandy!' - Adam Bennett at the Herald has some very sharp eyed contacts on an Air New Zealand flight who spotted the details of who might have been the bidders for South Canterbury Finance.

On Tuesday evening, a Herald source saw Mr Maier on an Air NZ flight leafing through a document which the source was able to identify as an "agreement for sale and purchase to sell South Canterbury Finance Ltd to Permanent Investments Ltd ".

The source said the document indicated a sale price of $2.65 a share, which is equivalent to $1.57 billion - more than the amount Mr Maier yesterday said the company might fetch if sold as a going concern.

4. 'The market's wrong about likely sovereign default and is usually wrong'- The IMF has written a paper saying that "Default in Today’s Advanced Economies is Unnecessary, Undesirable, and Unlikely.

The risk of debt restructuring is currently significantly overestimated. Although it is generally wise to assume that market developments reflect economic fundamentals, market overreaction does occur from time to time, with adverse implications for countries’ borrowing costs and debt dynamics.

For example, considering data on sovereign bond spreads over the past decades, markets sounded false alarms in the vast majority of episodes.

5. This is not a bank you'd want to work for - A German bank, Nordbank, is being investigated for doing amazing things to get rid of a senior employee, Der Spiegel reports.

Child pornography planted on a work computer, a house break-in and illegal wiretapping: The leadership of Germany's HSH Nordbank stands accused of going to great lengths to rid itself of unwanted senior officials. Prosecutors in both New York and Germany have launched investigations.

6. It smells like a bubble - A harbourside house with six bedrooms in Sydney has just sold for A$52 million. It was previously bought for NZ$14 million in 2001, the Sydney Morning Herald reports. Even the gardener has a bathroom.

SYDNEY'S prestige property market has woken from its hibernation with the reputed $52 million record sale of a Point Piper harbourfront property, Villa Veneto. The bullish deal almost doubles the highest sale since the onset of the global financial crisis in September 2008.

The grand five-storey Italianate villa owned by recruitment entrepreneur Andrew Banks and his wife, Andrea, was finished in 2004, having taken two years and $15 million to build on its dress circle Wolseley Road location.

Designed by the architect Michael Suttor, the six-bedroom house comes with a 21-person lift, home theatre, butler's pantry, glass-roofed dining room, sauna, art gallery, gym, linen chute and library. It comes with nine bathrooms - including one for the gardener.

7. Ouch - Yahoo Finance briefly showed the gold price hit US$3,400 an ounce yesterday, Infowars reports. It was wrong of course, but caused a ruckus nevertheless. HT Nicola via email.

Investors were briefly panicked yesterday when the Yahoo Finance website indicated that gold had soared to over $3400 dollars an ounce, an instant jump of 175 per cent. Possible reasons for the shocking spike ranged from a simple mistake to a secret signal being communicated to insiders as to where the commodity was really heading.

Just after 11am eastern time, the Yahoo Finance website gold graph indicated that the precious metal had jumped from $1235.60 an ounce to a whopping $3401.50 an ounce in the space of minutes. The commodity then quickly returned to its previous level almost immediately.

The only event that could precede such a massive and instantaneous jump in gold would have to be something on the scale of a nuclear war or a sudden and total collapse of the U.S. dollar.

8. Boomtown - Bloomberg reports, the medium house price in Karratha in remote Western Australia is A$775,000 and the average rent for a four bedroom house there is three times that of an average apartment in Manhattan.

“During ballots people would literally yell out ‘bingo’ if they got a block of land because instantly they knew they’d made A$100,000 ($90,100),” Eaton, 43, said in between monitoring workers at a building site in the town of 20,000 people.

“They’d build a house on it and their profit would go up to A$250,000.” The housing shortage in a region that’s one of the world’s biggest suppliers of iron ore and natural gas is driving up costs for companies such as Chevron Corp. and BHP Billiton Ltd. as they mine raw materials to feed China’s industrialization. Chevron, the second-largest U.S. oil company, was forced to lease seven-year-old cruise liner MS Finnmarken to house 350 workers at its A$43 billion Gorgon gas project.  

9. Totally irrelevant video - Here's a video from 1987 with a 25 year old John Key. The glasses he wears are huuuge. It's well worth watching to the end to get a feel of what our Prime Minister was like at 25.

10. Totally relevant video - Here's what US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was saying about the US Housing market in 2006. No bubble. Nothing to see here. No worries. HT Gertraud.

"This is a localised problem and not something that's going to affect the economy," he said then of the US housing market.