Bonus Bananas Mar 30, 2012

1) Wall Street's Lacrosse Mafia (Business Week) - Lax bros are everywhere on Wall Street, as evidenced by an earlier thread this week pondering when it's appropriate to get your "flow" back. But did you know that silver spoon sport might get you a job on the Street?

2) End Of Hedge Fund Marketing Ban Nears (FIN Alternatives) - One of the unexpected "benefits" of the recent passage of the JOBS Act is that it's no longer against the law to advertise for hedge funds. But don't get too excited, because your average hedge fund probably doesn't want the general public to see their performance anyway:

3) THE TRUTH ABOUT HEDGE FUNDS: They Win And You Lose (Business Insider) - This one might just blow your mind. It stands to reason that it's going to be tough to show clients a steady return when you're charging 2 and 20, but this is way worse than even I would have imagined. Don't look at this infographic on a full stomach.

4) Revisiting Harvard's most successful MBA class (CNN Money) - With monkeys getting accepted to B-school right and left these days, I thought it might be fun to share this article highlighting the HBS class of 1949. Upon graduating HBS, they all took jobs earning less than $4,000 a year. Yup, you read that right. Now that's basically what it costs to attend B-school per month. Good thing it's easy to get student loans, right?

5) THE NEXT SHOE DROPS: More Than 25% Of Student Loans Are Already Delinquent... (Business Insider) - Or maybe it's not such a good thing. The student loan bubble is getting ready to burst battery acid all over the American taxpayer. With over a Trillion dollars outstanding (you're fuckin'-A right Trillion gets a capital T), now more than $250 billion of it is delinquent. Ruh-roh, Raggy.

6) Obama Relies on Debt Collectors Profiting From Student Loan Woe (Bloomberg) - Luckily, the President has a plan to get on top of all these student loan delinquencies. What is it? Well, it starts with his boys calling you at 2 am demanding the money, escalates to informing your boss and co-workers that you're a dead beat with money problems, and winds up with a garnishment of your wages. All the while dirtbag professional collectors get to harass you! Problem solved!

7) A security patch for your brain (The Economist) - Your password security sucks. How do I know that? Because so does mine and everyone else's. We've all been trained to create passwords that are difficult for us to remember but easy for hackers to guess. It's time to turn the tables, and here's how. Correct horse battery staple. That's what she said.

8) Why Don't Young Americans Buy Cars? (The Atlantic) - This piece frets over the apparent rejection of materialism by the Millennial generation as it pertains to American cars. And here the whole time I just thought it was a combination of the facts that we're in shitty economy and Detroit makes terrible cars. But what do I know?

9) Housing Hype: Recovery Turns to Relapse? (CNBC) - Don't go firing up that MBS machine just yet. While housing looked like it was in a sort of pseudo-recovery for a while, it isn't. The new numbers are pretty horrendous and it's probably gonna be a long time before things get better.

10) The 5 Ballsiest Easter Eggs Hidden in Video Games (Cracked) - I know we have a lot of gamers on WSO, and the anti-social side of my personality has always loved a mean-spirited joke. Well, here are a couple of doozies. My favorite is the educational game that was programmed to curse at the children if they got impatient and clicked the mouse too many times in a row. Good stuff. Impatient little bastards.

The Video of the Week this week is the trailer for a new Adam Sandler - Andy Samberg movie called That's My Boy. I've pretty much given up on Adam Sandler movies. His early stuff was fantastic, but lately he's been the box office Angel of Death. However, Andy Samberg is hilarious, and if a Sandler movie has any hope of being funny it pretty much has to have Samberg in it. Plus there's a Wall Street connection: after growing up raised by a loser like Adam Sandler, Samberg's character goes on to become one of the youngest hedge fund managers on the Street. Hilarity ensues:

That's it for this week, fellas. I'm out all week next week because I'm travelling in Frankfurt. Let me know what you think of this week's bananas, and have a fantastic weekend!