Top 10 at 10: Bernanke sees 'green shoots'; De-leveraging grinds on; Anti-ANZ/ING campaign grows; Goldman abandons ratings agencies

Here's my Top 10 links from around the Internet at 10am. I welcome your additions and suggestions in the comments below. Here's a nice cartoon in The Australian. 1. US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke is feeling better about his world. He said in testimony to Congress overnight that he saw demand stabilising and signs of a bottoming out in the housing market, the FT.com reports. Here's a taste.

Bernanke said banks no longer appeared as concerned about each others' near-term solvency. With excess inventories being worked out and some improvement in overseas demand "we continue to expect economic activity to bottom out, then to turn up later this year", he said. A survey of the US services sector activity published on Tuesday also suggested the pace of decline was slowing, though it still pointed to mild contraction. The Fed chief emphasised that the evidence of stabilisation was "tentative" with better news on the consumer front set against extreme weakness in business investment. "We are likely to see further sizeable job losses and increased unemployment in the coming months," he warned. Recovery would "only gradually gain momentum" and economic slack "will diminish slowly".

2. Here's how the de-leveraging is squeezing the availability of credit in the United States. Banks are shortening lines of credit and adding new fees, the WSJ.com reports. 3. An excellent piece from Mish at Option ARMageddon about the looming problem of US adjustable rate mortgages due to reset soon. Last year when rates were higher and the resets were going to blow home owners away this was a massive problem. Now it's still big, but it's better. 4. The 'total recall' campaign by the groups of investors hit by the frozen ING funds is growing in size. They are staging demonstrations outside ANZ branches to call for all their money in two frozen ING funds to be repaid, arguing their ANZ advisors should never have put them into such risky funds. It great to see such grass roots stuff. Here's Marta Steeman and Alex Van Wel reporting on Stuff about the campaign. Here's a taste.

Yesterday, about 20 mostly retired men and women staged a peaceful demonstration outside the ANZ branch in Blenheim, waving placards and handing out leaflets. They said ANZ's in-house financial advisers led many of them to a position where they now faced catastrophic losses. Mike Hill, 73, told The Press he and his wife had been quite clear about what they wanted when he went to see his ANZ adviser to invest more than $500,000. "Our instructions to him were that we didn't want big interest, we just wanted our nest egg to be safe. It was my pension fund," he said. "We wanted low to medium risk. That's what he said this was, low to medium." Hill's investment had fallen in value to just over $100,000.

5. And Marta Steeman also has a piece here from one guy, Clive Beswick, who hopes to win a settlement from ANZ. 6. Here's some nice Euro-irony. Luxembourg, which is under attack by G20 leaders angry at tax havens, has pointed out that some of the biggest tax havens are in the United States. Here's a taste in eubusiness.com.

The tax-friendly US states of Delaware, Nevada and Wyoming should figure on an international blacklist of offshore tax havens, Luxembourg Prime Minister Jean-Claude Juncker said on Tuesday. Along with Belgium and Austria, Luxembourg recently came under pressure from its EU partners to ease its banking secrecy rules to avoid being put on a blacklist of tax havens being drawn up for a Group of 20 summit in London on Thursday. "I would like all the bold (leaders) in Europe who insisted that those three EU countries that practice banking secrecy drop it show the same courage towards the United States," Juncker said. "The G20 has no credibility as an undertaking if Delaware, Wyoming or Nevada or far-flung islands from the United States are not on the blacklist," he told lawmakers at the European Parliament in Brussels. "If there must be a blacklist then, America should have its place on it."

Take that! Here's more details in this lectlaw.com article and this 'dontmesswithtaxes' blog. 7. The backlash to the NZX's acquisition of Country-Wide Publications is in full swing. The Main Report's Max Bowden jumped into the fray with a call for the Commerce Commission to investigate the acquisition after an internal NZX memo was leaked showing the NZX thought they could "corner the market for agricultural news and data", given the NZX also owns Agrifax. Fran O'Sullivan weighed in with a few cryptic comments tossed into an interview with NZX boss Mark Weldon. Then Cathy Odgers (Cactus Kate) renewed her campaign against Weldon with a few pointed comments. No Minister had a crack and even Whale Oil (Cameron Slater) weighed in. This story is getting a bit of a run on. Although I must point out that we have a sister site called Agridata.co.nz that is trying hard to compete with the NZX on agricultural data and news. 8. I am loving this Telecom vs Vodafone stoush. I am a Vodafone data and phone subscriber and have noticed a significant deterioration in recent months. I twittered about it a month ago and have seen plenty of noise about the problems with Vodafone's network in recent months. Vodafone says Telecom knew about the interference and went ahead anyway, Stuff reports. 9. Yikes! It turns out the bonuses to AIG staff last year were US$454 million, not the NZ$165 million that caused so much political grief a few months ago, Reuters reports. I still don't really understand why there isn't more civil unrest in America about so much taxpayer's money (about US$3 trillion) being used to compensate bankers and ensure bank shareholders and bond holders don't lose money for making horrendous decisions. 10. Goldman Sachs' fund management arm has taken the momentous step of abandoning the use of credit ratings from agencies such as Standard and Poor's and Moody's, Reuters reports. A sign of things to come in the wake of the many (Enron/Credit Crunch/CDO/CDS) ratings debacles? It's also interesting because our Reserve Bank is leaning on ratings heavily in its new regulatory regime for non-banks such as finance companies and building societies. HT Felix Salmon. Your view?