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Welcome to interest.co.nz's morning briefing of what's news here and around the world. Everything you need to start the day in 90 seconds at 9'oclock.... Starting nowFirstly, with news from finance company Marac, which reported an 11% improvement in its profit and said it was confident about continued growth in a sector where others were in trouble.Marac said it had a diversified range of funding to make up for a drop in depositors funds, although it said its reinvestment rates remained up around the 60-70% levels they were at before the collapses of finance companies.Elsewhere, we had more bad economic news out of the United States. House prices fell a record rate in the December quarter and fell 8.9% overall last year. Consumer confidence, not surprisingly therefore, fell to its worst level in five years. And to cap it all off there was news that producer price inflation jumped 1% in the month of January alone. Producer price inflation in the last year has posted its biggest gain in 26 years.All of this news is stoking fears of inflation.Remember the US Federal Reserve is desperately trying to flog the economy back to life with lower official interest rates. The trouble is that real interest rates for businesses and consumers in the United States are rising. The wholesale markets are in many cases frozen and fearful. One thing they worry about is the Federal Reserve is pumping too much liquidity into the system and building up an inflation problem for the future.The biggest worrier, and the most important worrier, is bond investment supremo Bill Gross. He runs Pimco, which is the world's largest bond fund. He said overnight that Australian government debt is much more attractive than American debt because Australia's Reserve Bank appears to be actually doing something to fix inflation. The RBA is widely expected to buck the global trend and increase interest rates next Tuesday. Comments like that will only make the Australian dollar and therefore the New Zealand dollar more attractive. Hence we're near our post float highs.That was 90 seconds at 9 o'clock. I'm Bernard Hickey for interest.co.nz. Tune in after midday for a look at what's happening housing affordability and the future of shared equity mortgages.