Here are my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 past 7 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 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.
1. How long before someone here does this? - BusinessDay reports Australian department store group Myer is building a website that will allow Australians to buy directly from China and avoid paying GST.
This sort of thing becomes much more attractive in New Zealand now the GST rate is 15%.
Is it already happening?
Does anyone know of plans to do something similar here?
Good idea?
Myer is working on an international retailing website that will sell goods to Australian customers, shipping them from a warehouse in Shenzhen in southern China to avoid the GST and make Myer more competitive.
At a business lunch in Melbourne today, Myer chief executive Bernie Brookes said the company was working on the website, which would be up and running in February.
Mr Brookes said the company was creating the new site out of frustration over a lack of action from the federal government over GST-free shopping online.
2. Now it's gone mainstream - Here's Stephen Bartholomeuz at BusinessSpectator using the line pioneered by Steve Keen yesterday that the Australian government should be careful before creating a '5th pillar' that increases competition, lowers interest rate margins and further inflates Australia's property bubble.
Too right.
It is worth noting that the Reserve Bank of Australia submission to the Senate committee on banking competition effectively demolished the myth that the banks have been using their post-crisis increased dominance of the local system to gouge their customers.
It is also worth noting that the major banks’ share of housing lending has recently been falling, not rising, which is an indication that there is non-bank or regional bank competition.
Given that the fixation of Swan and other politicians appears to be home lending, it is also worth considering whether it is in the national interest for the government (presumably using taxpayer funds) to try to lower the cost of home loans at a time when the RBA is trying to use monetary policy to dampen consumer spending and control the inflationary pressures it believes will flow from the income shock generated by the record terms of trade.
There are some who might also question whether it is prudent to do anything to further inflate the housing market given what has occurred offshore.
3. Costly reunifications - The reunification of West and East Germany was enormously expensive for the Germans and took a decade or more to absorb.
So how much would it cost to reunifiy the two Koreas cost, assuming it happened peacefully.
Some people have started to have a crack at estimating a cost, given the recent Wikileaked comments from China about some of the younger leaders wanting reunification and the impending handover of power from the madman to his son.
Bloomberg's William Pesek reports the cost might be US$5 trillion. Ouch.
The price tag will be $2 trillion to $5 trillion over 30 years, says Peter Beck, a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council in Washington.
A South Korean presidential committee puts it between $322 billion to $2.1 trillion, but come on. The costs of German reunification -- about $2 trillion and counting -- suggest even $5 trillion is optimistic. It’s not a matter of whether the world is willing to bear the cost. It must.
North Korea is too nuclear to fail and a stable peninsula is absolutely in the best interest of the global economy. It’s among the biggest risks hanging over markets. In a sense, peace would be, well, priceless.
In practical terms, though, meshing the two Koreas together could cost more than Japan’s current annual economic output. It could cost more than double China’s currency reserves, six times U.S. President Barack Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package and 45 times Ireland’s bailout.
4. Wondered why Australia lost in the first round of voting for the 2022 World Cup? - Here's the promotional video they created to show to the voters. Truly awful.
5. Remember nuclear weapons? - This is a piece of Digital Art from Isao Hashimoto that tracks all the nuclear explosions from 1945 to 1998. Strangely compelling and scary. HT VaughnDavis via twitter.
Foreclosure homes accounted for 25% of all U.S. residential sales in the third quarter of 2010.
Tthe average sales price of properties that sold while in some stage of foreclosure was more than 32% below the average sales price of properties not in the foreclosure process—up from a 26% discount in the previous quarter and a 29% discount in the third quarter of 2009.
7. 'Evidence of massive fraud' - Al Jazeera's People&Power reports it has found evidence that billions of euros of European Union grants for structural development is being shuffled through to interests associated with the Mafia..
As in the guys with the horses heads.
Yikes.
Fraud and irregular payments were worth 1.3 billion euros last year, it reports. Property developers were at the heart of things... It seems there are a lot of half finished hotels in the Canary Islands...
And the Italian mafia got together to extort money from the builders of a motorway in Italy. I love how the mafia describe the distortion as a tax for operating in their territory.
No wonder financial markets are beginning to wonder about the financial sustainability of the European project.
For several months, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism has been looking into EU finances, and it has uncovered evidence of massive fraud.
Most disturbingly, as Angus Stickler now reports for People&Power, it seems that billions of taxpayer Euros are going straight into the pockets of organised crime.
8. Just my sort of image - This photo of a 'super cell' storm cloud in Montana republished at The Daily Mail gives a whole new meaning to the phrase: 'It was a dark and stormy night.'
9. Why American taxpayers are starting to understand how they were ripped off by rich American bankers. HT Roelof via email.
10. Totally amazing data visualisation video. HT Chris.
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