Thursday's Top 10 with NZ Mint: In pursuit of eudaemonia; The rage of Europe's young 'Los Indinados'; Ireland wedded to the euro until default; Cartoons galore; Dilbert

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 past 12 midnight  in association with NZ Mint.

I'll pop the extras into the comment stream. See all previous Top 10s here.

I welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.

This is officially the earliest Top 10 ever and done in honour of the June quarter Monetary Policy Statement from the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. I know I'll never find time later today unless I do it real early. As Black Francis sings below: "Where is my mind!".

1. A sign of things to come - One of the biggest owners of oil super tankers reckons the market for supertankers is about to implode.

Rates for these super tankers are an indicator of both demand for oil globally and supply of such ships.

HT Chris via email.

Bloomberg has the report:

Chairman John Fredriksen says the biggest crash in the cost of ships has yet to happen. It will be within “a year or two” that the market “collapses,” the 67-year- old said in an interview in Oslo last month. For Fredriksen, whose fortune was valued by Forbes magazine at $10.7 billion in March, that will be an opportunity to buy more vessels at a discount, he said. For other investors, it may mean that the more than doubling in freight rates predicted for next year by forward freight agreements, traded by brokers and used to bet on future shipping costs, is too optimistic.

The industry is contending with a glut of capacity as the fleet expands twice as fast as demand. Even as owners cut vessel speeds by an average of 11 percent in the past 12 months to save fuel and anchored 21 percent more ships, earnings slumped 81 percent. Rates on the Middle East-U.S. route have been negative since March, meaning owners are paying customers to use their ships, data from the Baltic Exchange in London show.

“We’ll wait until the market collapses and then we’ll buy up what’s there,” Fredriksen said May 25.

2. Just default - The Argentinian option is now being looked at by some in Ireland. Here's Irish economist David McWilliams.

He cites the experience of an Irish Agentinan Patricia O'Shea, who returned to Argentina after it defaulted in 2001. HT Brendan via email.

She explained to me that, after the default and the devaluation, it made sense to invest in Argentina again because the country was competitive.

The money that had left the country before the default – because it expected a default – came back. The price of all assets fell dramatically, new money gushed into the country and the economy grew rapidly – it has grown in each of the last ten years since the default on 2001.

The point is that the default and devaluation of the currency didn’t cause the economy to get worse. It caused the economy to recover because people like O’Shea invested after the default, not before it. There is life after default; in fact there is vibrant life. If we walked away from the bank debts in Ireland – debts that are not ours to pay – but continued to pay our sovereign debt, basic economics tells you that the economy would be stronger, not weaker; the balance sheet more robust; money that had left the country would come flooding back.

Having watched the EU again deal with Greece last week by preaching the medicine of no real debt restructuring – more debt and more austerity – it seems the lessons of Argentina from 1998-2002 have been lost on everyone. We in Ireland are making exactly the same mistakes as the Argentinians made back then.

3. Close to average - This table below from Bruce Bartlett at NYTimes' Economix shows New Zealand's tax plus private healthcare costs are in line with the OECD average and only just above the US level. HT Donald via email.

4. Here's an idea - Andrew Patterson at Radio Live's Sunday Business interviewed Xero CEO Rod Drury and Auckland University Professor Greg Whittred about Peter Thiel's idea of paying young entreprenuers NOT to go to tertiary education.

Rod Drury doesn't like the idea. He says New Zealand is different from America where costs are outrageously high.

Drury is so positive. He's fantastic to listen to and is doing a wonderful job at Xero and so many other things.

5. Reseeding the economy - This piece from Harvard Business Review's Umair Haque is getting on a bit now, but still resonates with me.

He argues for a recapitalisation of the economy. And for 'forporations' rather than corporations.

Sounds a bit ...er...radical, but worth a read.

Instead of creating new value, too many corporations merely transfer value from society to shareholders (consider, for a moment, the paradox of skyrocketing corporate profits versus record long-term joblessness, obesity, or carbon emissions). The problem isn't, when you think about it, that corporations are dysfunctional. The problem is the very opposite: it's that maximizing near-term profit, no matter what, is exactly what the modern corporation was made to do — and is bound to do.

Rebuilding our base of organizational capital means reinventing our most heavily utilized kind of organization, the corporation, to do bigger, better, more enduring things. How might we do it? By creating private-public partnerships to seed and invest new kinds of corporations. Consider the groundswell of states passing legislation for B corporations, a new kind of corporation which balances shareholder value and social returns, instead of prioritizing one over the other. Authentic prosperity depends on what I sometimes call "forporations": more efficient, effective corporate forms "for" the pursuit of more meaningful, disruptive goals than just near-term financial gain; that exist "for" the benefit of more than just shareholders.

6. The joy of human flourishing - Here's Umair Haque again with something fresher at CSMonitor.

And a brand new word (for me at least): eudaemonia or human flourishing.

Here's what Haque is saying:

Instead of bigger, faster, cheaper, Americans need a more fulfilling, satisfying kind of prosperity. The ancient Greeks called it eudaemonia – 'flourishing' – which means the pursuit of fulfillment, inspiration, creation, and accomplishment.

America's bankrupt, but not in the way you think. Not merely financially, but at a deeper level, it's bankrupt in terms of its understanding of prosperity – what a "good life" is imagined to be.

Here's how I'd contrast eudaemonia with opulence. The pursuit of opulence is predicated on having more, bigger, faster, cheaper, now – about immediate pleasure through material possession. The pursuit of eudaemonia is a more nuanced, complex conception of a good life, that asks: "How does the way you work and live make you smarter, fitter, grittier, more empathic, wiser? What did you build today – and how did it help someone live, work, or play meaningfully better?"

7. Britain is next - Reuters reports that a Moody's analyst has warned that Britain may lose its AAA credit rating.  The pound dropped as a result.

8. The Rage of the Indigants - Der Spiegel has an excellent feature here on how Europe's young are protesting at the economic malaise sweeping the continent.

Here's a sample.

 "We, the unemployed, the underpaid and the interns, are the best educated generation in the country's history," they wrote. "We are protesting so that those responsible for our precarious situation quickly change this untenable reality."

Carvalho, 25, who studied international relations, is a polite young man with a beard and a leather armband on his wrist. He says that he is normally a patient person. But when he discovered that, despite having obtained a master's degree in English, he would likely only be able to get a limited contract and that he would likely be forced to find work in Africa, he was overcome with fury.

Carvalho says that a song by the band Deolinda inspired them to protest. The lyrics epitomized their feelings about life: "I'm from the generation that doesn't get paid. It doesn't bother me. How stupid can I be? Things are going poorly, and that's the way it will stay. Those who can land an internship are lucky. What a stupid world this is, a world in which we go to school to become slaves."

More than 44 percent of people under 25 have no work in Spain, and almost one in three young academics is unemployed. More than half of those young workers who are employed have so-called garbage contracts, which are often limited to just a few weeks. Even during the boom years, young people suffered from bad schools, expensive universities and a slim job market. Since the real estate bubble burst three years ago and the crisis erupted, young people, once again, are the ones suffering the most.

Ironically, a 93-year-old Frenchman provided the template for the youth protests. "Indignez-vous!" or "Be Outraged!" is the polemic pamphlet that the former French resistance fighter Stéphane Hessel published last year. The Spanish "indignados" and the French "indignées" have borrowed their names from Hessel's title.

9.  Ireland seems wedded to the Euro - Irish economics professor Kevin O'Rourke points out the Irish politicians are Europhiles and are kowtowing to the European masters. HT Naked Capitalism.

10. Totally a video about the Weiner thing. I haven't touched it until now... here's Jon Stewart and John Oliver

And a bonus! Here's Kirsten Schaal talking about the Weiner story... She's the slightly creepy one that shadows one of the Conchords.

11. Totally a bonus music video with 14 minutes of pure Pixies genius. Joey Santiago does some wonderful things with his guitar around the 4 minute mark.