I'm not sure that Verizon Wireless really wants to be advertising on searches on Twitter for "PRISM."

High fees plus poor performance: The formula is pretty easy to determine what makes a bad mutual fund.

Some, though, are worse than others—and some are so bad that they've made it into one publication's unofficial hall of shame for charging big fees but delivering small results.

Funds that depend on bad market performance—"bear funds"—for their growth have done particularly poorly, as have those in precious metals.

Investors had every reason not to trust the market after last year's Facebook fiasco—a high-profile initial public offering gone bad on multiple levels.

Yet a year later, the stock market continues to rocket higher and the IPO climate is on balance better as well.

Facebook itself? Well, that's another matter.

But of all the negativity surrounding the company, it's highly publicized market flop seems to be exhibiting few contagion effects.

(Watch: What's Next For Apple and Facebook?)

"It definitely made some investors shy away from the market," said Dave Rovelli, managing director of U.S. trading at Canaccord Genuity. "But they have no place else to put their money, and that's why they're trickling back in now."

Before the housing market in the United States went into convulsions, you heard a lot of talk about the positive "externalities" of home ownership. The Bush administration made something of a fetish of the idea, saying its goal was to create an ownership society.

The best-known dissenter was the British economist Andrew Oswald. As early as 1996, Oswald was producing papers that forcefully argued that home ownership causes unemployment. The effect Oswald claimed to have discovered was strong: Every 5 percent rise in home ownership resulted in a 1 percent rise in unemployment. Oswald's original paper set off a cascade of others that largely confirmed his results.

Oswald is out with a new study, co-authored with David Blanchflower, that sheds more light on the link between unemployment and home ownership rates:

Journalist John Judis points out that the immigration reform proposal making the rounds on Capitol Hill may mix with Obamacare to hurt the employment prospects of American citizens.

The zero down mortgage is back—in Martha's Vineyard.

Ira Stoll at the Future of Capitalism blog has come across an article on "Home Buying 101" in the spring of 2013 "Real Estate & Homes" supplement to the Vineyard Gazette. A local mortgage broker by the name of Polly K. Bassett is quoted as touting how.

Bassett, the "co-owner and a broker of Martha's Vineyard Mortgage Company, L.L.C., said: "We have access to a wide range of programs such as USDA, which is a program where you can put no money down, 100 percent financing, and we also do a 97 percent financing with three percent down....There are a lot of programs out there for people buying their first home."

Buy your first home on Martha's Vineyard with zero percent or three percent down? This might be a good idea for a borrower if prices go up, but it's not a good idea for a lender if the price goes down. "USDA" isn't explained in the article, but it might be a U.S. Department of Agriculture program for farm property, which means the lender is us, the taxpayers. And the Federal Housing Administration has a three-percent down program, which means, again, the taxpayers are on the hook.

I put in a call to the Martha's Vineyard Mortgage Company, where the phone was answered by Carol Borselle, Bassett's business partner.

Borselle told me that the USDA mentioned in the article is, in fact, the Department of Agriculture. It turns out that the entire island is designated as a rural area eligible for a USDA loan.

According to Zillow, the cheapest home in Martha's Vineyard is a two-bedroom condo listed at $260,000.

_By CNBC's John Carney. Follow him on Twitter at @carney.

"Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I'm not sure about the universe."

Those were the words that Fredrick Douglas Scott attached to most of the emails sent to the clients of his boutique investment banking and financial advisory firm, ACI Capital. What the clients didn't realize was that the joke was on them, according to federal prosecutors.

In addition to being one of Ebony magazine's "Top 30 under 30" and claiming to be the youngest African-American to found a hedge fund, Fredrick Douglas Scott was a fraudster, according to the criminal complaint filed Monday in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York. The complaint was unsealed Tuesday after Scott was arrested.

In its most recent regulatory filing, ACI claimed to manage $3.7 billion in assets. The FBI said Scott used ACI to execute two related fraudulent schemes in which money wired to the firm by clients was stolen for Scott's personal use.

Goldman Sachs wants you to believe that Too Big To Fail banks do not actually enjoy a funding advantage.

The Wall Street firm recently put out a paper with the mild title of "Measuring the TBTF effect on bond pricing." It argues that the commonly-held view that TBTF banks can borrow cheaply because bond investors expect the government will support them used to be a little bit correct. Then it became very correct during the financial crisis. But now is totally incorrect.

The study argues that that six banks with more than $500 billion in assets paid interest rates on their bonds that were an average six basis-points lower than smaller banks from 1999 to mid-2007. When the financial crisis struck, the funding advantage grew far wider. But beginning in 2011, the funding difference reversed, with the biggest banks now paying an average of 10 basis points more than smaller banks.

"This undermines the notion that government support drives a TBTF funding advantage," the report says.

Well, not exactly.

It's time for the weekly check-in at East Hampton airport.

Each week, we peek at the arrivals at East Hampton. Last week, we found Phil Falcone's helicopter setting down for Memorial Day weekend.In addition, there were a large number of flights from the airports in Westchester and Bridgeport—the closest airfields to hedgefundistan.

Today we've actually got no flights from hedgefundistan. So perhaps it will be easier to get a dinner reservation in the Hamptons thisweekend.

The most interesting flight today is a NetJet from Washington, DC's Dulles. We have no idea which DC power player is headed up to the Hamptons for the weekend. But we do know that he or she is due to land at 6:48 tonight.

It's been ten years since prosecutors announced a $1.4 billion settlement with the Wall Street's biggest investment banks and two individual stock analysts over accusations that the firms and analysts had duped investors to curry favor with corporate clients. Under the terms of the settlement, twelve investment banks agreed to separate their securities analysis from their investment banking business.

One of the key reforms put in place in the settlement was the bar on basing the compensation of stock analysts on their contribution to investment banking revenue. This was meant to prevent analysts from becoming shills for the corporate clients that were paying fees to the investment banks for stock and bond underwriting deals.

A new study suggests that this part of the settlement may have fallen by the wayside.

Four researchers—Lawrence Brown of Temple University, Andrew Call of Arizona State University, Michael B. Clement of the University of Texas at Austin and Nathan Y. Sharp of Texas A&M University—surveyed 365 sell-side analysts to see how the business of stock analysis is conducted these days. Startlingly, they found that 44 percent of the analysts indicated that their success at generating underwriting business or trading commissions is "very important" to their compensation.

Only 20 percent indicated that underwriting and commissions were "not important" to their compensation. Which means that another 36 percent said these things—supposedly walled off ten years ago—were somewhat important. That's a total of 80 percent who said that generating underwriting business and trading commissions play some role in their compensation.

In other words, the so-called Chinese walls between analysis and investment banking appear to have come crashing down—and almost no one has noticed.