Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 am. I welcome your additions in the comments below. I'm glad we pay tax... 
1. Westpac NZ has breached a NZ$15 billion limit on liabilities that is a condition for its registration as a New Zealand bank and the Reserve Bank has asked Westpac to review the structure of its operating model in New Zealand, The Sheet reported. A spokeswoman for the Reserve Bank confirmed the details in the article were correct to Interest.co.nz.
Falling New Zealand dollar and interest rates pushed Westpac's New Zealand branch total liabilities beyond the $15 billion limit during the six months ended March 2009. As at March 31, the bank's total liabilities in NZ was at NZ$16.2 billion. The NZ$15 billion limit on total liabilities is one of the several conditions of registration imposed on the NZ branch. Westpac said it has notified the Reserve Bank of New Zealand on becoming aware of this non-compliance and is working, in consultation with it, on steps to remedy the non-compliance. The falling NZ dollar and interest rate increased the liability under interest rate and cross currency swaps as positions were revalued. The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has asked Westpac to review the structure of its operating model to ensure it can consistently comply with its prudential policies after it was found in 2008 that both the bank's incorporated entity in NZ and the branch had been non-compliant with their conditions of registration. An independent review will now take place with the terms established after consultations between the RBNZ, Westpac NZ and the NZ branch. The review will be conducted under the established processes and framework of section 95 of the Reserve Bank Act.
2. This is a startling story about a financial adviser who was kidnapped in Germany and held hostage by an elderly couple who demanded he repay 2 million pounds of their money he had lost. The Daily Mail reported that the advisor was beaten over the head with a Zimmer frame, bound, gagged and then taken away to a dungeon. He only got out when he promised to repay the money. I'm not sure I approve, but I don't have an awful lot of sympathy for financial advisers in New Zealand.
Pensioners battered a financial adviser with Zimmer frames before kidnapping and torturing him for losing £2million of their savings. James Amburn, 56, was ambushed outside his home in Speyer, western Germany, bound with masking tape and bundled into a car boot. "˜It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath,' said Mr Amburn, who was driven to the Bavarian lakeside home of one of the gang. "˜The fear of death was indescribable,' he said. Mr Amburn was rescued when he sent a fax to release funds from a Swiss bank and scribbled a message on it for the receiver to call police.' Shortly afterwards, the Swiss bank telephoned police in Germany and an armed team of special SEK commandos was scrambled and the house was stormed in the early hours of Saturday morning. Forty armed officers rescued Mr Amburn who was naked except for his underwear. A physician had to be on hand to help his captors into police vans because of their various infirmities. They now face up to 15 years in jail each for illegal hostage taking, torture and grievous bodily harm. Chief public prosecutor Volker Ziegler said: 'They were angry because they invested money in properties in Florida and he lost it all.
3. It turns out Treasury proposed a 'gift' of up to NZ$1,200 for pensioners and beneficiaries before the May budget to pump some cash into the economy. It would have cost NZ$1 billion, the NZ Herald reported. Luckily the government threw out the idea before it got going. Here are the full budget papers including all this sort of advice from the Treasury. I welcome your digging and comments below. 4. Everyone is looking for the US Federal Reserve's exit strategy now. How can the Fed withdraw the punchbowl of money printing and zero% interest rates at just the right moment to avoid an inflation explosion? Bloomberg reported that the Fed appeared to start the exit overnight when it let one of its emergency programs expire and trimmed two others.
Today's announcement comes a day after Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and his colleagues doused speculation they would pump more money into the economy to hold down interest rates. Officials expect to wind down the emergency-credit facilities as long as stresses "moderate as expected," the Fed said today. "They backed away pretty gingerly but still are backing away," said Michael Feroli, a former Fed official who's now an economist at JPMorgan Chase & Co. in New York. "The crisis is abating and the worst is behind them. In some areas, market functioning remains impaired. Things are better. Better doesn't mean normal but better. They don't want to back away too abruptly."
5. This is an indepth piece from Bloomberg on the role of Paul Volcker in Obama's administration. There were great hopes he would instill some backbone into the Obama team early on, but he was elbowed out in the first few weeks. Now it seems he's making something of a comeback. That's good, if true.
"Volcker has a semi-insider, semi-outsider role in the administration," says former Fed Vice Chairman Alan Blinder, now an economics professor at Princeton University in Princeton, New Jersey, who was also present at the dinner. "If he has the president's ear, the regulatory regime will come out tougher and more comprehensive. That's a good thing at this point, because I worry more about not doing enough to patch up the regulatory system than doing too much."
6. Nouriel Roubini is finally beginning to see some green shoots and sees the recession ending in 2011, although he is far from sanguine about the state of the global economy, TheAtlantic reported. He's also less worried about inflation.
"The Fed is now embarked on a policy in which they are in effect directly monetizing about half of the budget deficit," he said. The public debt is going up, and the federal government is covering about half of that total by printing new money and sending it to banks. "In the short run," he said, "that monetization is not inflationary." Banks are holding much of the money themselves; "they're not relending it, so that money is not going anywhere and becoming inflationary."
7. Russia is considering a massive bailout of its banks as fears grow bad loans could paralyse its economy, the FT.com reported. HT ZeroHedge.
Igor Shuvalov, deputy prime minister, will consider taking stakes in troubled banks when a group of experts on the crisis meets on Friday to discuss ways to recapitalise the country's banking system, according to a draft proposals seen by the Financial Times. The proposal, one of several under consideration, would see the government issue OFZ treasury bills, a type of bond, to boost the balance sheets of the biggest banks. In return the state would get preferred shares. Unlike the US bank bail-out, the Russian scheme would see the government take board seats and get veto rights at the banks it bails out.
8. Former IBM saviour Lou Gerstner has called for short term gains to be taxed at 80% as a way to counter the short-termist greed culture on Wall St, Bloomberg reported.
Gerstner acknowledged that such a change would be "controversial" yet argued it is necessary to encourage investors to think about the longer term. The top tax rate on gains from investments sold within one year is now 35 percent. "We do have a greed or an inefficiency that comes out of excessive focus on the short term," said Gerstner, who bemoaned an investment climate driven by quarterly earnings and a 24-hour news cycle. He was an executive at American Express Co. and RJR Nabisco Inc. before joining IBM. Gerstner, 67, also criticized compensation practices, saying "there's been astoundingly unnecessary, excessive executive compensation in certain instances."
9. Is the US Treasury manipulating the way it reports bids for government bonds by foreign central banks? Reuters reports a change in the way it tallies demand may be inflating the size of these bids. 10. Mish talks about a decade of lost jobs in the United States and how the employment outlook is still grim.
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