Top 10 at 10: Gaynor's attack on syndicates; Westpac's Rotorua pain; US yields up again

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10 am. I'm glad I don't work in IT... 1. Brian Gaynor pointed out in his NZHerald column on Saturday that property investing syndicates are not for the faint of heart, following up a theme touched on by our own Alex Tarrant last week. Gaynor pulls no punches in describing their syndicated commercial property deals as illiquid, unrealistic minefields.

They are not too dissimilar to the disastrous securitised property products developed by Wall St that are the foundation of the current economic crisis. Nevertheless income-starved New Zealand investors are attracted to these syndicates because the promotional material contains a picture of a property and the numbers "9.5 per cent" or "10 per cent". These numbers refer to the cash return per annum but there is usually an asterisk warning that this is the projected return for one year only. Most syndicates have no termination date, annual returns may fall after the first year and it is the promoters, rather than the investors, who get rich from these schemes.

2. Westpac was unaware it had mistakenly given NZ$10 million to Rotorua service station owner Leo Gao until it got an anonymous tipoff, the Sunday Star Times reported. This looks ugly for Westpac and raises questions about the robustness of its systems.

News that the error was uncovered because of an anonymous tip-off rather than detection work by the bank itself has startled bank industry insiders. "Clearly we're dealing with a whole litany of errors rather than one simple mistake," one insider told the Star-Times.

A manager at another trading bank, who asked that her name and bank be withheld, said a mistake of that magnitude would normally be picked up. "Warning bells get sent, anything that's out of the ordinary, anything in a person's account that's a bit different will get picked up by the Wellington office straight away, probably the next morning." The question remains then how did a simple error with a decimal point go undetected long enough for $6.7m to be transferred out of the account, nearly $4m of it irreversibly? Westpac is saying little but has confirmed the first error was made in early May during the "formalising" of a temporary overdraft facility, with a limit of up to $100,000. Sources have told the Star-Times a long-serving bank employee processing the debt facility from the bank's offices in Christchurch missed out the decimal point when entering the figure on her computer. In fact, a computer system flag was raised at the bank some time later over the size of the overdraft and a conversation did take place about it between the bank employee and her manager, but in an apparent case of miscommunication the matter was put aside and the error was not corrected.

3. Here's what happens when a government owned investment company takes over a listed Port company. The Auckland Regional Council-owned Auckland Regional Holdings (ARH) bought Ports of Auckland in 2005 and then more than doubled its debt to NZ$362.5 million. Now the Sunday Star Times reports Ports of Auckland faces a NZ$105.5 million debt timebomb due on December 18. Now everyone loves lazy balance sheets. A couple of years ago, not so much. 4. Hanover Finance, which is in moratorium, stands to lose NZ$60 million from a second mortgage in the Kawarau Falls development, which is in receivership, Greg Ninness at the Sunday Star Times reports. 5. General Motors has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, which could see another 20,000 workers lose their jobs and millions of GM pensioners lose benefits, WSJ.com reports. 14 factories are set to close and the US government will end up with a 60% stake after lending or investing more than US$60 billion in the bailout. I am so glad I'm not a US taxpayer or own a Holden. Holden explains what this means (not much it says) for Holden in Australia and New Zealand. 6. But here's the most important news in the global economy in the last couple of weeks. US treasury bond yields and US mortgage yields are rising fast as investors fear the coming wave of government bond issuance and grow very nervous about the prospect of more US money printing, Bloomberg reports.

Yields on Washington-based Fannie Mae's current-coupon 30- year fixed-rate mortgage bonds rose 29 basis points to 4.62 percent, up from 3.94 percent on May 20.

This is why I think any green shoots will wither and why we're in for a long US recession and an even longer and slower global economic recovery. 7. British Airways' CEO Willie Walsh has warned the airline is in a "fight for survival," the FT.com reported. He may just be talking tough to bully BA's unions to deliver concessions, but it's ominous talk. 8. There's another market collapsing quietly without too much noise. Calculated Risk passes on a research note from Citigroup analysts pointing out that "more than $75 billion of CMBS (Commercial Mortgage Backed Securities) market capitalization has been lost" since the S&P request for comment on changes to their U.S. CMBS rating methodology was issued two days ago. Regular readers of Top 10 at 10 might remember this was pointed out by Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge. 9. Singapore's sovereign wealth fund (or at least one of them), Temasek,  lost nearly US$40 billion between March and November last year, the WSJ.com reports. That should require a national day of mourning for the city state, assuming, of course, they were allowed to know. 10. The excellent Tyler Durden at ZeroHedge points out an IMF white paper on the US Federal Reserve's burgeoning balance sheet. The conclusions are that the Fed is now America's biggest actual bank and it is now managing fiscal risk as well as monetary policy. Is Ben Bernanke now more powerful than Barack Obama?