Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 1 pm today. As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to bernard.hickey@interest.co.nz.
See all previous Top 10s here.
My must read today is #7 to understand why inflation is so tepid globally.
1. Lake Buttermilk - This week is the week when Fonterra's spring flush peaks.
The Wall of Milk is at its biggest now and this year Fonterra and farmers are struggling to cope with a 5% rise in production, and in some cases up to 20%.
I've just driven through the Waikato from Auckland to Rotorua and back.
It's as lush and productive as I've ever seen it.
No wonder Fonterra is struggling to handle the volume.
So much so that excess butter milk is being dumped in a natural basin near Atiamuri to form a butter milk lake. I won't be water skiing on it...
2. Genius - As a new Wellingtonian I've learned the most important thing in any real estate choice is getting sun and avoiding one of those dark holes behind a hill.
But maybe I'm not thinking outside the box enough.
The Atlantic reports two towns in deep valleys in Norway and Italy stumbled upon the idea of putting a mirror on the top of a hill and shining it down into the valley.
Now all they need is a really big magnifying glass and they won't need cigarette lighters either...
3. Never again - Will I ever eat a chicken nugget.
Not after this Atlantic dissection of this staple of modern freezer cabinets and fast food joints.
4. Show me the profit - Amazon is a darling of the stock market. The trouble is it makes almost no profit. Xero haters will love this.
NYTimes takes a sceptical view.
Amazon shares are up around 150 percent since mid-2010, which perhaps not coincidentally was the last time the company had sizable profits. In other words, investors really decided they loved the company only when net income began to slide.
“This isn’t supposed to happen,” said William H. Janeway, an economist and venture capitalist. “It violates mainstream finance theory. Very few companies have been valued this way outside a systemic bubble.”
No one is asserting that Amazon is a flat-out bubble, but there is an increasingly noisy debate about when it will — or even whether it can — deliver the sort of bottom-line profits that investors normally demand from a company expected to post $75 billion in revenue this year.
5. No wonder Auckland homes are so popular with Chinese buyers - WaPo reports much of Northeast China is basically unliveable because of smog.
Now if only I could get them interested in Wellington... Very clear air here. :)
6. Japan's debt mountain - Roger Bootle writes at The Telegraph that Japan's debt is near a tipping point.
Hmmm. How many times have we heard this before?
The Bank of Japan is printing up a storm. It should just buy its government bonds back and cancel them.
7. Blue babies - The Press reports Canterbury's Chief Medical Officer is warning young mothers near Ashburton not to feed bore water to their babies if they are using one of the bores poisoned with nitrate. If they do they risk giving their babies blue baby syndrome.
This clash between dairy intensification and those who worry about water quality will be a theme of the next decade.
The health board has been working with maternity carers in the Ashburton area to ensure pregnant women and parents know the risks of consuming water with high nitrate levels.
"It's a ticking time bomb,'' Humphrey said.
"Sooner or later, a mother will not be aware of her water supply and she might make up some formula and that might lead to a tragedy."
The Ashburton water management zone committee needed to deal with the increasing nitrate levels as it would probably take decades to reverse the upward trend, he said.
"We know that clean farming is possible but clearly it is not happening," he said.
7. China's over-capacity problem - One of the drivers of endemic deflation for manufactured goods is huge over-capacity in China's factories.
The Chinese Government plans to do something about it, the FT reports.
I'll believe it when I see it. It's why deflation is more likely than inflation.
The State Council released on Tuesday “Guidelines to Resolve Severe Overcapacity Problems” on its webpage. The five sectors targeted are steel, cement, electrolytic aluminium, sheet glass and shipping. New projects will be blocked and current projects may be reappraised.
Capacity utilization rates in the above five sectors are well below the international standard – the plan said all sectors were in the 70 per cent range. Margins in the sectors declined sharply, with many enterprises suffering heavy losses, but there is still a pipeline of expansion projects, it said.
The State Council warned that “proper measures must be taken now, or cut-throat competition would effect the market, which will cause bigger industry losses, unemployment and increase banks’ bad debts… and even escalate to influence people’s livelihoods and social stability.”
8. Pay it forward - Fast food style. The NYTimes reports on a growing movement to pay for the fast food being delivered to the car behind you.
These Americans have some interesting ideas. Is this what charity looks like in the modern age?
9. Meanwhile - The Guardian reports America's top 10 CEOs took home US$4.7 billion in pay, bonuses and shares last year. Fair enough? I wonder if they pay for the Big Macs ordered by the car behind them...
Or maybe they don't buy fast food...
10. Totally the Daily Show's Jon Stewart interviewing Alan Greenspan.
The Daily Show
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