Top 10 at 10: Mish praises NZ; Worse than the depression; Baltic currency bomb

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet over the last 48 hours or so. I welcome your additions in the comments below. I am glad I do not need to injure myself. There were a bumper crop of Dilberts over the weekend there's a few in here today. 1. Here's my NZHerald blog with 10 suggestions for tax changes to reform New Zealand's economy and dig ourselves out of a fiscal black hole. 2. Here is a 50 minute video after the jump where Mike Shedlock of Mish's Global Economic Analysis explains what he does and details the current economic outlook to a bunch of people at Google. He has an interesting story. He was a programmer and consultant who eventually resorted to blogging to make an income. If you have 50 minutes free, it's well worth watching. He has a nice line: "The green shoots we are seeing are a mirage." He talks about the real value of gold, fractional reserve banking, the failure of Greenspan and Bernanke, and how government spending usually makes things worse. He also calls for US troops to be brought back from Iraq and Afghanistan. He also wants the US Federal Reserve abolished. He also compliments New Zealand and John Key as the only country that is not trying to solve its debt and overspending problems by borrowing and spending. He does this 14 minutes 35 seconds in. HT Blair Rogers from Peak Providence. 3. Those worried about Europe's economy, its banks and where the next roadside bomb might go off in the global financial markets should keep an eye on the 'Baltic Three'. Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania have fixed exchange rates vs the Euro, but are under intense pressure to devalue their currencies because of property and economic collapses. FTAlphaville has a very nice look at this issue here. 4. If anyone had any doubts about who really runs the US Congress they need to read this story on how the banking industry lobbied their way to a 7% improvement in second quarter earnings by twisting the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) to change the rules on mark to market. This excellent Wall St Journal story lays it out in detail. And America thinks its democracy should be exported. God help us all. 5. Felix Salmon points out that the US unemployment number out on Friday night of 9.4% is already worse than the worse case scenario used by the Federal Reserve in its stress tests. 6. This is a cracker from Barry Eichengreen and Kevin O'Rourke at VoxEu which compares (again) the way this global recession is tracking versus the early days of the Great Depression of the 1930s. The chart above shows industrial output is tracking in line, while the blog post shows the stock market worse off this time and global trade volumes worse off this time. Plenty sobering for a Monday. 7. Daniel Gross at Slate picks apart the debate about rising US bond yields in this piece, which pits Niall Ferguson's 'inflation vigilantes' against Paul Krugman's 'signs of revivalists'. An entertaining read, but a tad partisan. I'm with Ferguson and the vigilantes. 8. It turns out there is a lot of oil stored in tankers as traders wait for prices to improve. There's some speculation the owners of this stored oil will put it back on the market and drive down the oil price, FTAlphaville reports. 9. Niall Ferguson has a go at Martin Wolf's apologia for fiscal deficits in the FT no less. 10. This is a bit off the beaten path. Here is an interview on BBCWorldService with Australian anthropologist turned soldier David Kilcullen about how to deal with terrorist insurgencies. He was a key adviser in the change in the American approach in Iraq and has some fascinating views on what to do in Afghanistan. He has written a booked called the Accidental Guerrilla. The interview is 25 minutes long, but well worth a listen.