Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 to 2pm, 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 Monday's Top 10 at 10 via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
I'll pop any surplus suggestions I get into the comment stream
Good on them.
It's about time the property boom that skewed the economy in favour of consumption and borrowed was skewed right back to saving and investing.
Taxing the obsession with capital gains is a good first step.
It's about time some politicians had the debate we've all been having in 'private' for the last couple of years.
Acutely conscious of the political dangers of even mentioning, let alone discussing, wealth taxes, the party is moving extremely cautiously and saying little publicly about the review of its tax policy.
However, what it is saying is being worded very carefully to ensure that it does not narrow its tax reform options by ruling out introducing one or other tax before the policy is finalised. If it wins next year's election, Labour will have to find some means of broadening the tax base to provide alternative sources of revenue to pay for implementation of its policies because government finances will be so tight.
2. Now the Press Gallery are onto it - The economic malaise gripping the nation has finally filtered through to the Parliamentary Press Gallery in Wellington, who are beginning to wonder what it means for John Key. Here's John Armstrong in Saturday's NZHerald. He's probably the most influential political commentator in the country, I reckon. I sense the mood is turning against Key, rightly or wrongly.
John Key's prediction that the recovery would be "reasonably aggressive" has backfired. National is starting to look like it does not have the answers. English's talk of "rebalancing" may be sound economic theory. But the average punter has little interest in that. English is consequently sounding out of touch. National is starting to look very vulnerable.
3. I'm not going to buy a Big Mac in Switzerland - The Economist has updated its Big Mac index, which is a clever way of working out if a currency is overvalued or not. The index translates the local cost of a Big Mac into US dollars.
Not surprisingly, the currency wars mean Big Macs are overvalued in Brazil and Switzerland, but massively undervalued in China and Malaysia.
New Zealand is not included in this chart, but our research (we didn't actually buy and eat one) shows that Big Macs cost NZ$5 in New Zealand, which is about equal with the US dollar price after the currency conversion. So our currency is correctly valued...
4. Excellent graphic on why the US recovery doesn't feel like much of a recovery - Neil Irwin and Alicia Parlapiano have produced an excellent graphic at the Washington Post that shows why the US economic recovery doesn't feel like one.
They make the point that economic growth needs to be faster than 2% or unemployment there will rise to 11.9%.
The US economy is awash with debt and cannot dig itself out without either a burst of inflation or a massive debt restructure that wipes out the bondholders and shareholders of banks.
Guess which one Bernanke, Geithner and Obama are choosing?
Default via money printing and inflation
The nation’s economic woes boil down to this. Compared with a healthy economy, about 7 million working-age people and 5 percent of the nation’s industrial capacity are sitting idle, not producing what they could. The economy is growing again, but at a rate — less than 2 percent in recent months — that’s too slow to keep up with a population that keeps increasing and workers who keep getting more efficient.
This is the output gap, the divide between the amount the United States can produce and what it is actually producing. The gap, currently $900 billion, explains why we feel so miserable more than a year into what is technically classified as an economic recovery.
5. Has it started? - Perthnow.com.au reports that asking prices in Perth, the biggest real estate boom town in Australia, have started to fall. HT Hugh P
HOUSE prices in Perth are on a downward trend with sellers reducing asking prices by 6 per cent as the local market floods with properties for sale, according to the Real Estate Institute of Western Australia.
The latest statistics from REIWA indicate that the number of properties for sale across the metropolitan area has reached the highest level in almost two years. And fresh data from REIWA has confirmed the median price for Perth properties is falling after reaching a high of $500,000 in June.
6. 'The squid wants all its tentacles' - Goldman Sachs is looking to buy out all its partners in Australia and New Zealand, The Australian reports. Could be a few investment bankers with some tidy windfalls wandering around looking for some even flasher cars. There might be a few property developers who want to sell them a few of those cars...
FOR the 130 partners in the local joint venture of Goldman Sachs, this Christmas could come with a present. Its Wall Street major shareholder could make a buyout proposal valuing the group at as much as $1.5 billion. But if any offer does arise -- and insiders are greatly divided on the issue -- it may not be one that all partners will readily accept.
The chiefs of the local venture, Goldman Sachs & Partners, remain in talks with its New York-based 45 per cent shareholder on the form, structure and price of any proposal.
7. The Fraudclosure mess - The more that emerges from the foreclosure swamp in America the uglier it looks. Here's The Daily Call with its piece: One Nation under Fraud. This is becoming a big political issue.
The mood in America is turning dark as the populace realise they've just been ripped off in a monstrous way by the banking and political elites. Barack Obama continues to defend the banks' interests. He should be orchestrating a nationalisation and break-up of the big six and then a debt restructure that allows America to start again.
Tomorrow, a bank—not your bank, but any bank—could evict you from your home. Even if you didn’t know the bank was foreclosing. Even if your mortgage is paid off. Even if you never had a mortgage to begin with. Even if the bank doesn’t hold a single piece of paper that you signed. And major banks not only know this fact, but have spent millions of dollars to defend it in court. Why? The answer starts with a Jacksonville homeowner named Patrick Jeffs.
In 2007, Deutsche Bank sued Jeffs for his home, which is a necessary step in the process of foreclosing on a homeowner in the state of Florida. Curiously, despite the fact that he immediately hired a law firm to defend his property when he found out about the foreclosure, neither Jeffs nor his attorneys were at the trial. That’s because it had already happened. Deutsche won by default because Jeffs wasn’t able to travel backwards in time to attend, even though the trial featured a signed affidavit indicating that he had been served his court summons.
The only problem with the summons Jeffs supposedly received was that it had been conjured out of thin air. In June of this year, a Florida court ruled that the document was fraudulent, as the person who was supposed to make sure Jeffs was served had mysteriously received a copy of the summons before the lawsuit had even been filed, and Jeffs never even saw the copy.
The lawyers that Jeffs hired to defend his case say that fraud such as this is not uncommon. It’s a widespread problem, and it has cost countless families their homes.
“I think it’s safe to say that 95% of the foreclosure cases in Florida involve some form of fraud on the part of the bank,” David Goldman of Apple Law Firm, PLLC told The Daily Caller in a phone interview. “It’s probably closer to 99%. And the court system is helping them get away with it.”
8. Print baby print - The race to the bottom continues. Here the Centre for Economics and Business Research in Britain predicting the Bank of England will print a further 100 billion pounds to boost the economy and keep the pound falling at the same rate as the US dollar.
Whoever doesn't print will be left standing high and dry when the music stops. Will that include us?
Britain faces the largest public spending cuts since World War II as the government tackles the record budget deficit. The British Chambers of Commerce earlier this month backed a call by policy maker Adam Posen for the central bank to expand its bond stimulus plan as recent data indicate the recovery has slowed.
9. Now the Germans are grumpy - When economies get stressed the people tend to lash out at whoever is in the vicinity.
We're seeing it in America with the Tea Party, which has been directed by its big-money backers to lash out at government and taxation, (when they should really be lashing out at the banks and government).
The French are rioting over an increase in the pension age from 60 to 62 (!)
Now the Germans are having a fairly ominous debate about all the Turks and Eastern Europeans who have migrated to Germany in the last 20-30 years.
This debate was kicked off by a most unlikely source. A member of the Bundesbank's ruling council, Thilo Sarrazin, kicked off the debate a few months ago with a wildly popular book called 'Germany abolishes itself' that accused Muslims of failing to integrate. He also said that Jews shared a particular gene, which eventually forced him to resign from the Bundesbank.
Now Chancellor Angela Merkel has come out and said that Multiculturalism has failed in Germany, the BBC reports.
The German Chancellor, Angela Merkel: "lmmigrants should learn to speak German"
Attempts to build a multicultural society in Germany have "utterly failed", Chancellor Angela Merkel says. She said the so-called "multikulti" concept - where people would "live side-by-side" happily - did not work, and immigrants needed to do more to integrate - including learning German.
The comments come amid rising anti-immigration feeling in Germany. Continue reading the main story A recent survey suggested more than 30% of people believed the country was "overrun by foreigners".
10. Totally relevant video - Here's Stephen Colbert on the problem of unemployment in America. The next scapegoats might be goats because they steal landscapers' jobs...
| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| People Destroying America- Goats Steal Landscaping Jobs | ||||
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