TGIF Link Dump

It's the between-semester break, so Friday isn't such a big deal (unlike when I'm teaching). However, it does signal the end of the school week. So tomorrow is family day.

Lately I've been going to the YMCA to swim and bike before breakfast (it's either that or look for a sponsor to pay for advertising space on my increasingly oversized backside). We have a family membership (it's only $16 more a month than an individual membership) and it's a mere two miles from the Unknown House. So tomorrow, we'll take Unknown Son and Unknown Daughter to go swimming at family swim time.

But before I get back to work, here are some links to keep y'all busy:

MarketWatch.com has some good tips to help you avoid mortgage fraud.

Craig Newmark links to a site that gives Meanings and Origins of Phrases, Sayings and Idioms. Since I'm a self-confessed "word nerd" and fan of slang, I wasted about a half hour on it today already.

As usual, there are a number of good stories in the Wall Street Journal. In the first (from a couple of days back) we find that The SEC is trying to show that the benefits of their proposed rule requiring 75% independence for the directors of a mutual exceeds its costs. They can't seem to, and they're arguing that it's a limitation of the methodology. Here's a thought - maybe it's because the benefits don't exceed the costs (nope, nah, can't be).

In another WSJ story, Serena Ng reports how there are more and more companies issuing "junk" rated bonds. She argues that it's because of both the increases in LBOs and increases in investors' (like hedge funds) appetites for high-yield debt.

In the third and final WSJ piece, Shefali Anand is examining whether the increasingly large role played by hedge funds is causing distortions in the market for small-cap stocks.

Enough bloggery - back to work.