• What Ben and Hank watched to get psyched up for today's Capitol Hill hearing.

• Is MainStreet.com the worst idea ever? Or is Portfolio just super-psyched not to be the newest kid on the street anymore?

• MBIA wants you to trust the accuracy of their internal risk analysis and forget you ever heard of Bill Ackman.

If someone needs to explain to you why this is appropriate for DealBreaker, you probably shouldn't be reading this at all. (Via Gawker)

Wes: Yo, dude! What did you do this weekend?
JP: Same old shit, man. You know? Chewed some ice, waterboarded myself.

This message brought to you directly from subprime America.

The campaign to demonize smoking has scored so many victories that many of us now live in occupied territory and have begun to sympathize with the captors. It’s the smoking version of Stockholm Syndrome. Where once we were outraged by smoking bans in saloons we now find ourselves enjoying the absence of the scent of burnt tobacco when we return from a night of bent elbows. Particularly in winter, when sweaters and heavy coats absorb the stench, we find ourselves wondering how we ever tolerated pre-ban pub life.

But the smokers have begun to strike back, and not a moment too soon. In Germany, a story circulated that three employees had been fired from a small telemarketing company for refusing to smoke and requesting non-smoking accommodations. Thomas Jensen (or perhaps Joschko, depending on which version of the story you read), who allegedly owns the company, goes so far as to call for revenge against the non-smokers.

"Smokers have always been our best employees. Non-smokers interfere with corporate peace," Jensen said. "Our non-smoking employees were actually convinced that they had the right to smoke-free zones. They just complained all the time about smoking, and I don't like grumblers.

"I can't be bothered with trouble-makers," Jensen is quoted saying. "We're on the phone all the time, and it's just easier to work while smoking. Everyone picks on smokers these days. It's time for revenge. I'm only going to hire smokers from now on."

Unfortunately, it turns out the story was a hoax. Thomas J has recanted and the German reporter who originally filed the story has retracted it. "He said it was a joke and worth the trouble. He said he's a chain-smoker himself and said he was tired of smokers being hassled so much," the reporter said. So the smokers have begun their revenge through media pranks. But next time it might be for real.

[Disclosure: Here at DealBreaker we've been known to smoke at our desks in defiance of health ordinances and regularly consume whiskey with our coffee. With each puff we imagine the liberty bell rings out a bit louder for freedom.]

German newspaper says hoaxed by pro-smoking crusader [Reuters]
Nagging non-smoking workers get burned [MSNBC]

It's hard to believe that it's been twenty years since "Bonfire of the Vanities" was published. Much of what was groundbreaking in Wolfe's novel has now entertained the common culture so that it is almost hard to appreciate how original his tale of the moral mayhem into which we were descending was when it was published. Remember, back then it was supposed to be Morning In America. Wolfe showed us that there was some truly dangerous under-currents brewing. We've since passed through that period, shuffling off some off its aspects--especially crime, which has been underperforming for years now--and adopting some it into the very heart of our culture--wealth worship and political correctness.

Today, the New York Times asks some of the people who characters in the book were based on about how New York has changed. The most interesting remark, however, comes from Wolfe himself.

He tells the Times:

The big excitement in the financial world, hedge funds, have already shifted their center of gravity out of the city, he said.

Greenwich, Conn., is the new Wall Street, and New York is the Chicago Commodities Exchange.

We're not really sure whether Tom's upgrading Chicago or downgrading New York. But if he is downgrading Chicago, he should probably spend some time learning about Chicago derivatives traders.

Looking Back on the Bonfire of the 1980s [New York Times]

Today we mark a happy day for our Republic--the repeal of the dreaded prohibition amendment 74 years ago. A demon-spawn of progressive error thinking, prohibition plagued the nation for 13 long years. It was a colossal policy failure on every level, failing to produce any of the results that its supporters had claimed for it. We plan to honor the day with a glass of scotch and an open umbrella, the symbol of the "wet" movement.

Hey, remember Merle Hazard? The guy who sings the best ever country song about mortgage-backed securities, derivatives and leveraged buyouts? Well, the other day the New York Times profiled him, revealing his secret identity as a mild mannered money manager.

"Mr. Hazard, to be technical, has another identity, as Jon Shayne, a 46-year-old money manager who studied philosophy at Harvard and then got a law degree from Vanderbilt and whose company manages more than $120 million from Nashville," Peter Applebome writes.

And, for those of you keeping score at home, he thinks things are going to get worse before they get better. On the bright side, he is available for annual shareholder meetings.

Funny Songs Are Inspired by Sad Times for the Rich [New York Times]

The most important financial story of the day has been called into question. Hot shot hottie CNBC producer Stephanie Landsman—who is apparently well connected with other members of her species—spoke with Gisele Bundchen’s manager, who told her that the supermodel isn't siding with Warren Buffett as a U.S. dollar bear after all.

We were about to declare the bear trade on the dollar totally over on the grounds that super-model endorsement is certainly a contrary indicator for financial decisions. But it looks like the trade might be alive and well after all. Bundchen's manager, Anne Nelson, tells CNBC that reports that Gisele wants to be paid in euros are "false
"Some idiot in Brazil reported something just to make news," she said.

But we have some reason to doubt that Bundchen is really a dollar bull babe. “Nelson points out that Gisele lives in New York City, and thus needs U.S. dollars for her big-city lifestyle,” CNBC writes. But this doesn’t quite hold-up. It’s totally possible that Gisele is keeping her savings in Euros and converting them back to dollars for day to day uses. Maybe a denial too far?

Also, it's hard not to think that some sort of PR spin went into this denial. Gisele if you're short the dollar, the American public will be short you! Retract, deny, rinse, repeat.

Gisele's manager did not return our requests for a date interview with Bundchen.

Supermodel Gisele Not in Buffett's Bear Camp on Dollar After All, Manager Tells CNBC [CNBC.com]

You can check out any time you like but you can never leave.

(Warning: link plays music and contains at least one brief image which a reader has said is potentially NSFW.)

"In the age of ultra-sensitivity to sexual harassment, people might think that this guy's response about women being depreciating assets is not exactly how they want their firm to be perceived by the public," said John Carney, editor of DealBroker.com.
--BBC News

We totally have to remember to check out that guy who writes for DealBroker.com. That site sounds awesome!

Marriage seeker gets short shrift [BBC]

Extremely geeky but very funny.

One of the persistent education trends in recent years has been the ratcheting up of graduation standards in high schools. The end of social promotion, piling on language, science and math requirements and stacking standardized tests on top of standardized tests.

Part of this is a natural reaction to the realization that our teachers have simply not been doing a good job teaching students. Since we can't trust the word of teachers that students are learning the right thing, we set up objective tests.

But have we gone too far? In our generous and egalitarian urge to make every child above average, we now require a very high level of performance for students graduating from high school in many areas of the country. In California, for instance, graduating students are now required to take Algebra I, Geometry, and Algebra II. Now understanding these subjects is probably the minimum requirement for many jobs in our new economy, it's not clear that every student in, say, Los Angeles—where only 10% score above 500 on the math portion of their SAT—is really capable of passing the requirements.

Writer Steve Sailer thinks raising the requirements to this level is, well, a little bit nuts.

I suspect that the mathematicians who dreamed up these standards wish that they had been taught like this in high school. They wouldn't have been so bored if their courses had been geared at a much higher level of abstraction.

So, this is how they get their revenge on the assistant football coach who bored them so badly when he taught them Algebra I -- by making him try to explain, on a hot day in early September, the closure properties of the irrational numbers to high school freshmen who add and subtract on their fingers.

Most of DealBreaker's readers have a facility with numbers. It's a job requirement for much of Wall Street. So we might be the best qualified to judge whether everyone is capable of passing something as basic of Algebra II. But we're curious what the general opinion of our readers is of this level of math requirements in high school. Is every child a budding quant, just waiting for math teachers to get their act together and start assigning Fermat's Theorem as homework?

Are they nuts? The State of California's Algebra I standard [iSteve]

Apparently we’re “snickerers.”

We like to think we’re more belly-laughers. But we like this description of why DealBreaker is important: “Because every classroom needs a kid in the back row, throwing spitballs.”

Sorry. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s back up. Market Mover Felix Salmon has posted “An Interactive Guide to the Econoblogosphere.” It maps out the econblog space into a number of categories and isn’t afraid to pick favorites. We’re not only Salmon’s favorite back of the class clown blog. We’re also the only one.

After you check it out the guide, stop back here and let us know if you can figure out exactly who is doing what in the icon Portfolio assigned to us.

The Econoblogosphere [Portfolio]

The brightest news in the credit markets today isn’t the potential cracks in the wall against credit for the big private equity buyouts. It’s the launch of a new financing agency, which is offering home loans, auto loans, and loan loans. As we say in poker tournaments, a new power is heard from.

The latest, uhm, entrant into the ring where lenders do battle promises it will “compete so you don’t have to”and employ its “figure-4 process” to pin high-interest loan down to the mat. And, once thing is for certain, it’s got flair.

Ric Flair that is. The flamboyant professional wrestler recently announced that he is starting Ric Flair Finance. The website is adorned with pictures of Flair dressed in gaudy wrestling robes, sporting a shock of beached blonde hair. It promises “With Ric in your corner, you’re sure to win!”

Ric Flair Finance homepage [ricflairfinance.com]

Many investors skeptical of highly structured and highly leveraged financial products and frustrated by the recent performance of some of the more highly leveraged hedge funds, got a bit of light-hearted fun in their email box today when a missive arrived announcing a new product: “Constant Obligation Leveraged Originated Structured Oscillating Money Bridged Asset Guarantees, or COLOSTOMY BAGS.”

We could help but think of the aptly named Fixed Income Annual Sporting Clays Outing that Morgan Stanley’s Derivatives Products Group held in the 1990s. The short name was FIASCO, and many of the investment products they sold soon bore out the name.

The Colostomy Bags promise to take advantage of “infinite leverage” and other innovative strategies.

"Its an actively managed, unlimited liability, open ended investment with no maturity date, which pays LIBOR plus 5,000 and has no correlation to traditional investments" said a spokesman for the Investment Dealer who engineered the product. "It's based on a CDO structure, but it's designed to default BEFORE the first coupon payment, which you'll agree has no correlation with stodgy traditional investments and is a perfect fit for portable alpha scams, er, strategies."

We’ve been trying to uncover the authorship of the email. So far no luck. If you know, please drop us an email at tips@dealbreaker.com.

After the jump the full story on the new product.

It's Bess and Muffie. We won't pretend that Equity Private is even here in spirit, because the last time we did that, we were taken to task over "possibly jeopardizing [her] position, since the higher-ups even started sensing [she] might've been named in a blog post" and so on and so forth (to be honest, we weren't really listening-- I was fielding texts from an irate Carney and Muffie was SMSing with Richard and trying to find the chocolate sauce.) We also won't pretend to be so happy with each other at the moment, because someone might be a scab and someone else might have a stick up her person and someone else might not understand the delicacies of a certain situation. We will start from the beginning (of Sundae Strike).

For those of you who need a refresher, we were in the midst of taking a stand against the invasion of our playspaces as of Friday afternoon; yes, our playspaces had been violated-- heinously violated-- and we were demonstrating. We tried to picket but Muffie couldn't find any color of wood at Home Depot that matched the white background of the posterboard we were going to write on [Note from the Muff: EP, I understand why they fired Bob Nardelli now. I mean have you BEEN to a Home Depot? They do have Ralph Lauren paint though] but we were still sending a clear message: this aggression will not stand!

Hello, everyone, Bess and Muffie here (and Equity Private in spirit).

You might have noticed there was a drop off in posts today. Many of you may have questions about it. Unfortunately, we've been advised by counsel not to talk about these matters publicly. Bess will likely be back in full capacity on Monday, but don't take that to mean anything. [Ed.'s note: Forget that! I'm not coming back until justice is served cold] Trust no one and carry a big stick. Right now we are having a group meeting, tucked away in the safe confines of Muffie’s absurdly large condo. We’re also working on private computers that cannot be accessed by prying eyes. You may have noticed that this became a problem for one of us (hence, ALL OF US) last evening. Listen here—we all took Women’s Studies 100 and know that this kind of behavior is unacceptable. Which brings us to our next order of business: Sundae Strike. We’ll be making them and we’ll be doing one for as long as it takes. There will be no work from us whatsoever at DealBreaker (or anywhere else) until some justice emerges. Not only that, but we expect your support. We are therefore putting together a little rally for the striking employees of DealBreaker to protest stuff at Cellar undisclosed location tonight around 10, if any one would like to (take a guess as to where we'll be and) show us his or her support by buying us drinks that will not in anyway be reciprocated (unless you count left-handed compliments or, even, pure insults). Wear a white pocket square (or a paper napkin for you Bear Stearns folks) so we will know you are a supporter of DealBreaker Women.

Bess Levin left DealBreaker HQ early tonight. Something about a doctor and the vague implication that the “illness” that kept her out of the office for a week last month might be returning. As we prepared to lock-up, we discovered that she had left her computer turned on. This happens a lot. What made this unusual was that she had left an IM chat window open. A chat with her friends Muffie and Equity Private.

Sorry, Bess. It’s probably wrong to share this with our readers. But actions have consequences and with great power comes great responsibility. Next time you leave early, we want to see a note from that doctor of yours.

"ohbabyitsbess" joined the chat
4:23:34 PM ohbabyitsbess: Hey Muffs
4:23:49 PM muffiehbs05: Hey Bessy!
4:24:08 PM muffiehbs05: Where's the london girl?
4:24:14 PM ohbabyitsbess: i don't know i was just going to say
4:24:28 PM ohbabyitsbess: i love that top on you
4:24:28 PM muffiehbs05: She is always late.
4:24:36 PM ohbabyitsbess: typical
4:24:39 PM muffiehbs05: Do you? Actually, don't tell anyone but it was a gift.
4:24:47 PM ohbabyitsbess: from...HIM?
4:24:53 PM muffiehbs05: Kinda makes me feel like I had a boob job.
4:25:16 PM muffiehbs05: Nooo! He won't do gifts. His wife combs his credit card statements with an auditor.
4:25:19 PM ohbabyitsbess: looks good though, carney would probably like it
4:25:22 PM ohbabyitsbess: hah
4:25:25 PM muffiehbs05: Carney is gross.

"equityprivate" joined the chat

4:27:17 PM ohbabyitsbess: speaking of carney
4:27:21 PM ohbabyitsbess: looks who decided to show up
4:27:38 PM equityprivate: Bess. Muffie.
4:27:51 PM ohbabyitsbess: you look sheepish, ep

Think Conde Nast's Portfolio meets Sex and the City. At least that’s how we imagine the pitch meetings went when Darren Star pitched his new show, Cashmere Mafia, which is about four professional women in New York City. But where SATC emphasized the relationships of the women (it was, after all, based upon a Candace Bushnell’s dating column in the New York Observer), Cashmere Mafia will focus on the careers of its four protagonists.

They are all ridiculously successful, it seems. The sort of women who Portfolio hopes will make up its projected 40% female readership. (A highly unlikely demographic makeup for a business magazine. DealBreaker’s readership is only about 18% female.) One runs a hotel chain. Another, inevitably, is a managing director at an investment bank. (Francis O’Connor, pictured left).

The Sun reports that the pilot just wrapped filming. "The characters are all friends from business school who are in the power echelons of New York. The show is about their work and how they balance work, family and relationships and in some ways the extra workload that women have to bear in times like this," Star tells the Sun.

Cashmere is the new Sex [Sun]

Apparently, it tastes nothing like chicken.