Tuesday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: Global warming; China's new Panama canal; Commodity crash coming?; No cartoons tonight

Today's Top 10 at 10 will be short.

My heart is not in it.

No cartoons or video.

My thoughts go out to the people of Christchurch.

We all have friends and family and work colleagues there, as I'm sure do many of our readers.

It's hard to think of anything but those horrible scenes in Christchurch.

1. Global warming the thing to watch - Renowned investor Jeremy Grantham has written aggressively about the risks (and opportunities) for investors from Global Warming, Climate Progress writes.

2. New Panama canal? - Liam Halligan at The Telegraph reports on China being in advanced talks to build an alternative to the Panama canal. HT Kokila.

The mooted 220km rail link would run from the Pacific to a new port near Cartagena on Colombia's Atlantic coast. Imported Chinese goods would be assembled for re-export through the Americas and beyond, with Colombia-sourced raw materials filling ships making the return journey to Asia. Beijing is now reaching very high, pushing China onwards to the zenith of its modern-day power.  

3. Chinese cities take action - China Global Times reports how many cities are taking their own steps to try to calm down the property market there. HT Reece by email.

Authorities in about 10 cities, including Shanghai and Guangzhou, will prohibit locally registered citizens who already own two or more homes, or those without a local residence permit, or hukou, who have owned at least one home, from buying more houses, the Xinhua News Agency reported Saturday.

Additionally, non-local registered families who cannot produce documents certifying they have paid for social security or income taxes in these cities for one year are banned from buying property. Nanjing and Harbin joined Chengdu, Qingdao, Changchun, Nanning and Guiyang over the weekend in releasing similar policies.  

4. Inflation fears - AP reports on how prices are inflating on the ground in China. HT Daryl via email.

The headline inflation numbers hide even sharper increases in key items. In January, the price of fresh fruit soared by more than a third from year earlier, while eggs rose by a fifth, the National Bureau of Statistics reported.

At the Xinya Shopping Center, a supermarket on Beijing's east side, the price of sugar is up 80 percent over a year earlier, while high-quality rice costs 65 percent more, according to manager Wang Yongyi.

"Since the second half of last year, we have been busily changing the price tags to mark the prices up," Wang said. "It seems that the more control we had from the government, the higher prices rise."  

5. Rising food prices - The World Bank says rising food prices have pushed 44 million into poverty, the Globe and Daily Mail reports.

The World Bank is warning that global food prices have hit dangerous levels, particularly in poor countries where the prices of many key staples have jumped by more than 50 per cent in six months.

“It is already clear recent price rises for food are causing pain and suffering to poor people around the globe,” the bank’s president, Robert Zoellick, told reporters Tuesday. He added that bank officials are worried food inflation could prompt more protests similar to those in Egypt and Tunisia.  

6. The Great Compression - Jack Sparrow (!) writes at Seeking Alpha about the great compression happening in America. HT Wallis

Look around and you can see this "Compression" phenomenon everywhere. Companies are compressing productivity into the output of fewer workers. The Federal Reserve is compressing the discretionary income of the bottom 70% (and especially the under-employed) by ignoring the inflationary impact of its policies. China, a long-time veteran of exploiting its own labor force, is compressing the earnings power of workers through mercantilist trade policies and fudged inflation statistics.

Dictators in the Middle East compress the well being of their subjects by running kleptocrat regimes that siphon wealth out of the system... and so on. It's quite remarkable really. Under the management of a liberal Democrat U.S. President and (until recently) liberal Democrat congress, we have seen perhaps the most lopsided wealth-transfer effort in decades - not from rich to poor but vice versa. It's like LBJ's Great Society in reverse.

Bottom line: The stealth-inflationary asset-propping monetary policies of both the Federal Reserve and China, to the extent they drive paper asset returns and optimism among those with means, are simultaneously brutalizing the silent majority without adequate means of saving (or even paying the bills). As the U.S. equity market soars, we are in real danger of creating an institutionalized underclass. The Fed's great hope, of course, is that the love trickles down before the experiment goes bust.

In Chairman Bernanke's world, the healing power of rising nominal asset prices will eventually console not just the top 30%, but the bottom 70% as well. But why should this happen? If we can correctly identify the current earnings and data recovery as a "Great Compression" phenomenon in which the many are sacrificed for the few, is there any logic for justifying things will change?  

7. Commodity crash coming? - Gary Shilling reckons a slump in China will cause a crash in commodity prices. HT Peter

Shilling predicts that China will have a hard landing, and that this will hit commodity prices. He says that the way to play in on the downside is through the commodity currencies Australia, New Zealand and perhaps Canada. He calls Australia a Chinese colony.

From the write-up: "That hard landing is bad news for commodity prices. He's betting against the entire commodity complex, saying once the industrial metals such as copper fall, it will cause a domino effect in agricultural products such as cotton, wheat and soy beans. That commodity crash will also manifest itself in weaker "commodity" currencies such as the Australian dollar, the New Zealand dollar and, to a lesser degree, the Canadian dollar."

Sorry. That's enough for now. I'd welcome three extra for the Top 10 from our readers.