Unwatched episodes of "The Daily Show" are crowding our DVR right now, but we had certainly heard about the Stewart-Cramer Smackdown that has been going on all week. So, when we woke up from a prolonged post-supper nap last night just as "Reno 911" was ending, we had to stay up to watch the thrilling conclusion.
And came away feeling very sorry for Jim Cramer.
Stewart hammered his guest in a way in a way that he rarely does -- aggressively challenging Cramer with his own words, not really letting him get his thoughts together and give full, coherent answers, controlling the conversation rather than letting it evolve. It was, says today's New York Times, less an interview that a forum to "act out a cathartic ritual of indignation and castigation."
Anyone who has seen Cramer interviewed outside "Mad Money" knows that he's actually a pretty passive fellow. He was embarrassed and nervous, and it showed.
A huge source of Stewart's indignation stems from CNBC's manifold failures as a network. As relentless cheerleaders for Wall Street, they helped inflate the bubble that has now burst. They failed in their journalistic capacity to dive beneath the rosy scenarios spun by corporate flacks and inform the public of what was really going on. So the fact that they now have the nerve to try to re-brand themselves as the go-to source of financial wisdom is an outrage.
I'm not a CNBC fan, but I do believe that one of the problems we, the people, are having trouble with right now is wrapping our brains around the complexity of our economic woes. Whenever we let ourselves get distracted, when we go off on tangents, we waste our energy. So while I agree with Stewart's assessment on many levels, I wish that Cramer had been together enough to make the obvious counterpoint:
CNBC is not really a network for the masses. It's a source for financial insiders, staffed by financial insiders. (Cramer's show is really one of the few hours of the network's programming designed for the more casual investor.) As such, it suffers from the same problem political journalists face: without access, you're dead in the water.
Not only do political and financial journalists give deference to friends and colleagues, they understand the grim reality that if you piss on this CEO or that "high-ranking Administration official" too hard or too often, you can forget about getting your phone calls answered the next time you need them. When you have 17 hours of programming to fill each and every day, that's a serious threat.
For all the Daily Show sturm und drang, at the end of the day, Jim Cramer and CNBC aren't even on the Top Ten list of villains in this economic drama.
Here's something to think about:
In the spring of 2000 -- nine years ago -- a financial analyst named Harry Markopolos looked at Barnard Madoff's booming new hedge fund. "It took me five minutes to know that it was a fraud, " he told 60 Minutes earlier this month. "It took me another almost four hours of mathematical modeling to prove that it was a fraud."
He compiled a report and sent it to the SEC. In May 2000. And in October 2001. And in October, November, and December of 2005. And in June 2007. And in April 2008. Nobody did anything. All while the list of people being Ponzi-ed out of their net worth grew and grew.
As long as everyone was making money, nobody really cared. Not the Government, not the watchdogs, not the public at large.
As long as everyone was making money -- or seeming to make money -- there was no impetus to act on anything.
As long as consumer credit was abundant, there was no reason to question the wisdom of basing 70% of our economy on consumer spending.
As long as the stock market kept breaking records, there was no reason to assume that most retirees wouldn't be able to ride their 401Ks into their golden years.
As long as home prices kept going up, there was no reason to think that subprime and "exotic" mortgages were not a good idea.
And because there was a gigantic, global pool of money that needed to be invested somewhere, nobody was really paying attention to the complex new investment tools financial players were busy creating.
The idiocy was obvious....in retrospect.
Now, we have to question all our assumptions. It isn't going to be a pleasant process, and it's going to take a long time and a lot of false starts. A lot of innocent people are going to suffer. The endgame is not clear.
In fact, there's only one real certainty in the world today: that Jim Cramer has to be mighty happy to see this week end.
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[To all my readers: If you haven't yet, please take some time to listen to this episode of "This American Life" and this episode of "Frontline." They are enlightening.]
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Comments
This is the best blog I read about the Cramer-Stewart interview the whole morning. Good analysis on all aspects of the issue.
Rated for fairness and honesty.
In the original CNBC slash, the Daily Show team showed a clip of Cramer saying that everyone knew that the market was overvalued, but you should buy anyway because that's what you do. That's just bullshit. These guys weren't thinking about getting interviews, they had an invested interest in making people believe that the market was something that is was not and I commend Stewart for skewering Cramer on that point. He knew it was a scam and then told people it wasn't. And I'm supposed to feel sorry for him when he gets caught for it because he thought the video that appeared on last night's episode wasn't gonna end up on tv? In the words of Jon Stewart, FUCK HIM!
And it's not as if the choices for running this network are either do what they did and give CEO's an opportunity to lie about their businesses or piss on them. There is an entire range of possible ways of doing this, namely journalism. Because you ask someone a tough question doesn't mean that you are 'pissing' on them. And if they don't answer phone calls, you can tell your audience that so and so declined to be interviewed and use that information to inform your audience. NPR does that shit all the time. CNBC was a 24 financial commercial network, effectively running nothing but commercials for particular stocks.
You may be right that even if Cramer tried to do something, it would not have mattered, but that does not mean you're allowed to lie to people on television when you are being propped up as an 'expert' on making money. That's a fallacy of false consequence. So fuck him. Fuck CNBC. Fuck all those guys who are smoking Cubans with their fucking bailout money. I hope they rot in hell.
Thanks for the post and sorry for the rant.
You are wrong. CNBC is not a network for financial insiders. They are not even its primary audience. The information that gets transmitted on Cramer, on Closing Bell, on Power Lunch, on Squawk Box etc. is nowhere near specialized enough for true financial insiders to take seriously. This is a station for people with significant amounts of investable or disposable income (turned out to be the same thing, didn't it), who are decidedly *not* financial insiders, to find pre-packaged research into where they might put (or not put) their funds. This population of lawyers, doctors, small business owners, computer programmers, academics, engineers, commercial artists, chefs etc. were the ones targeted, seduced and abandoned by the mirage of financial reporting that CNBC provided. This mirage was actually an extended advertisement for the corrupt corporatocracy that is the network's main client. It was and is, as Stewart said, an infomercial, a round the clock infomercial, and the most effective of all infomercials, because unlike those cheesy programs about colon-health, the simulation of real news gathering on CNBC was, during market hours anyway, nearly perfect.
I say nearly because it is true that the non-insider investor that relies on CNBC programming had already been jobbed once, during the dot.com bubble of the late nineties, when experts like Henry Blodgett continued to shill for tech giants like AOL, long after they knew they were headed for a crack-up. There was reason not to be surprised, then, that CNBC, would cheerfully ignore the warning signs of the recent tsunami and even inveigle its viewers to stay in their paddleboats for one last turn near the shoals. But make no mistake, it was not the financial insiders they were most eager to bamboozle in this manner. It was an upper middle class--managerial, professional, academic, technical--that had grown ever larger over the last twenty years--large enough to provide the critical mass of an audience that the financial insiders alone never could.
As such, it suffers from the same problem political journalists face: without access, you're dead in the water.
What you mean is, if you want to be a media whore, without access to the pimps you're dead in the water. Seymour Hersh has been able to conduct fist rate investigative journalism for years and years . . . but he doesn't have his own show where he can kiss the ass of the rich and powerful.
I'm sure there are some of us that got a little too excited by this "showdown," but Stewart doesn't have access to the Ben Bernakes, Bernie Madoffs or the dozens of douches at the heart of this mess. Hell, Santelli doesn't have the balls to sit down with JS and I really would have loved to see him eviscerated. Seriously, Stewart and Colbert take shots at media outlets and purveyors because that is their market, CNBC is fair game. I agree that Cramer shouldn't become the poster boy of this economic goat-fuck; however, he violated his own rules. I have watched Cramer regularly over the last 18-22 months and have read a couple of his books. Cramer talks regularly about becoming too "greedy" and that if it looks too good to be true, it is. However, I doubt that prudence sells many ads on CNBC.
There are degrees of difference in journalism. Sy Hersh certainly has informants and insiders that he knows better than to burn. Without them, he wouldn't be able to do his job as effectively. All journalists have sources, and all those sources have to be treated with some deference if you want to keep the information flowing.
Again, I don't want to get drawn into a debate on media ethics. I agree that CNBC isn't exactly a shining beacon of the trade. But I think this is a distraction from much bigger problems ongoing in the world financial markets. It is, at best, a sideshow.
The larger issue, which Stewart may have dropped the ball on, was making the link between what CNBC did and what was going on behind closed doors on Wall Street. There was a great deal of deception on everyone's part, including deception of one's self. Cramer obviously knew that there was a bubble and that a prudent investor would shed some weight, so to speak, for the upcoming bust, but instead he pressed people to do just the opposite. In the same way, AIG and Lehman and Bears Stern pushed on the market a bunch of crap that they did understand, but tried to make it seem like was a sound investment basically because the commodity had been traded a lot.
If Stewart would have gotten Cramer to talk about these things, maybe it would have been a lot better, and that may happen after this latest interview in the future, but if the guy wasn't gonna just come on and say 'I fucked up', which he did not, then he deserved what he got. He may not be the only culprit here, but starting to see how the culprits worked this thing out will help us identify them in the future. And with all this shit on the internet, hopefully our kids can see it too.
rated
Your second point seems to conflict with your first.
You seem to say that CNBC can't be journalists without burning CEOs, yet the guy on 60 Minutes did the most important piece of investigation without deferring to Bernie, or even needing his cooperation. Aren't hedge funds supposed to register their information, and keep the info public?
"Not only do political and financial journalists give deference to friends and colleagues, they understand the grim reality that if you piss on this CEO or that "high-ranking Administration official" too hard or too often, you can forget about getting your phone calls answered the next time you need them. "
In a nutshell, that quote defines what ails all journalism today: the insider syndrome. It leads to mischief by all parties, the journalist included.
Funny, but I.F. Stone never feared pissing on "this CEO" or that "high ranking administration official," and virtually a who's who in Washington feared him. Rather, they treated him with deference. Despite his lack of insider status, they feared him, not vice versa.
Likewise, Sy Hersh gets the story and no CEO or high ranking administration official would dare be seen in public with him. Its time to challenge the insider syndrome, Ms. Michon. Why not let it start with your call to arms?
(Cramer's show is really one of the few hours of the network's programming designed for the more casual investor.)
Cramer behaved recklessly giving bad advice to those viewers least able to discern it was bad advice. His bad advice was given added weight and crediblity by his employers. He deserved to be called out on that reckless behavior.
The cure for being shamed on national TV for behaving recklessly is not to behave recklessly. Stewart did what other "real" journalists should have done long ago.
Does Cramer deserve to be this week's "shiny thing" news story that distracts Americans from health insurance issues, financial crisis issues etc.? Probably not but like Limbaugh and the octomom before him he will be forgotten soon enough.
I incur from your points about Madoff that it is the SEC who deserves national scorn and I hope that is coming.
Thanks for the links to Frontline and American Life. You provide substantive references for the discussion.
And, I started to feel sorry for him too, but Cramer is a grown man. He bit off more than he could chew and he paid for it. Such is life. Perhaps he should rethink both the stocks and the battles he picks.
Exactly. Now we're shooting the messenger for playing Pied Piper.
And I adore the quote on your banner from Russell - a code I live by!
Welcome to America today, where show biz is all. When our presidents are just acting the role, why would you expect our infotainment personnel to be any more authentic? Those guys and gals on the evening news are not reporters, Ann Coulter is not a venerable constitutional scholar, and Jim Cramer's real area of expertise is show biz, not financial doings. What do you expect in a country where we hang on the words of wisdom that sports figures and actors have for us because the people who really know stuff are kind of boring and confusing and we can't really identify with them?
Heather--I appreciate your pov. However, Stewart is a heat-seeking missile for bullshit, and Cramer is full of it. Yeah, he looked sad and pitiful--sad and pitiful all the way to the bank.
Stewart pointed out the truth that financial journalists were not doing their job. Cramer claims his show is merely entertainment, but it seems to me his audience was the the folks who like yelling talking heads and who actually listen to them like they know what they are doing. You can't have it both ways. While he was a stand in for his network in this showdown, Stewart wasn't just after CNBC, he was after all financial journalists. The tape from CNBC was just perfect format for his show. Serious analysis ought to be done by print journalists, the ones who use the word 'investigative' when referring to their writing.
This is perhaps overly kind spin because shows like 60 Minutes have had no trouble with this because people tune in to hear “they had no comment.” People inherently sense that reasonable organizations would at least face press scrutiny, and that when people in the public eye start to hide, there's a story to be had.
And it's also not fair to say no one made noise. In order to get attention, someone official-sounding has to make a fuss. People like me have fussed for ages that the market appeared “fragile” but since my specialty area is not this kind of thing, no one cared. That's true for most Americans. The answer is always “if you're so smart, why aren't you doing this for a living” or “all the indicators are reading green” etc. So you're right there were people consistently ignoring it, but you're wrong to leap to the conclusion that even a majority of people didn't know—it's more fair to say that even in our democracy, sometimes a majority is not enough to have power. Just look at how clearly the populace has sent the “Get out of Iraq” message, more than once, and how fast it's being pursued.
If there is something even slightly out of order, every one of these shows has an obligation to tell us they're sensing something funny because often, as with Watergate, it takes a long time for the truth to out. And with many of the Iraq crimes, it's being slow even now. The financial market will be the same way, everyone protecting the system in which they're employed, fearful of a new system not because it wouldn't be better for the public but because it would threaten their personal job. It would make them suddenly inexperienced and would make new arrivals the power-brokers. That's what it's really about. And that's why John Stewart's criticism was the right one.
Surely all of these causes are unethical and odious. But you know what? To pretend that there's no personal responsibility for our personal financial ruin is ridiculous. I think Cramer's a clown at best, and I generally love everything Jon Stewart does. But last night, he lapsed into simple, satisfying populism, and didn't let his guest answer. I don't think Cramer could have had an answer that would have satisified me, but Stewart's better than that--as an interviewer, and as a thinker.
If you buy the "CNBC's fault" argument, I'll be happy to sell you other populist gems like "The immigrants are taking our jobs!" To bad the President's call for personal responsibility in his inaugural fell on so many deaf ears. There's plenty of fault to go 'round--and some of it is yours.
Yes, Stewart was loaded for bear (stearns); he had every right to be given Cramer's dismissal of Stewart as a cheap comic. People who follow Stewart know his capabilities. He turns it on when he wants to. Cramer had no place to hide--and deserved none.
I got up and amened like it was Sunday at Ebeneezer Baptist Church when Mr. Obama issued his call for a renewal of personal responsibility. I hate that the credit card companies got the usury laws of this nation largely repealed. I hate that the mortgage brokers made deliberate use of the complexity of their industry and the desirability of the results it can achieve to bamboozle borrowers. But I also hold the borrowers responsible for allowing the brokers to misstate their income, and for allowing themselves to rationalize themselves into debt-peonage to Citi and Chase and BOA. The truth is for the last 20 years, at least, Americans, with the possible exception of the loudly and justifiably proud few, have been farmed for their debt. It's not quite the scene from The Matrix with all the humans arrayed like batteries, but the similarity is there--Big Finance hooks and farms people, keeping them in debt, thriving on the proceeds, and using the lucre to buy more Congressmen with which to further diminish the regulatory structure.
But they couldn't do it without us.
Telling them now they should have done their homework is not really fair. Ordinary people were told a hundred different ways they were fools for not doing these things. The people who were the professionals told them. The people buying were not professionals at this. The ordinary rule of law, as I understand it (though I'm not a lawyer), is that when there are two parties and one has substantially more knowledge than the other, the law construes in favor of the person who had the less knowledge, because they're so easiliy made into a fool by the one who should know.
To excuse MSNBC because they're really not for the general public but for already savvy (and rich?) investers is far too generous a position. They advertise themselves and caper about the studio (especially Kramer) to entice and excite the predictably gullible American Public.
No. Stewart's excoriation may have been naive (like the majority of public participation in Wall Street), however, I felt no sorrow for the man admitting an apparently honest regret. I may even feel more amenable to Kramer's analysis than ever.
Also, Yay! Stewart. He is my hero. You did a nice job summarizing the crisis Heather Michon, good job.
Was there a bit of grandstanding on the part of Stewart? Probably.
But it still gave vent to the outrage many of us are feeling. I for one would have been very disappointed if they played footsie with one another in order to serve some twisted notion of decorum. Things have gone waaayyy beyond that. Cramer knew otherwise he wouldn't have been there.
When someone tells you you can have the American dream--that you can own a home, you don't ask as many questions as you should. Often times you don't even know the questions to ask. When I think of all I didn't know as I signed the pile of paper for the first house I bought, it scares me shitless. There are many people who were taken advantage of in real estate due to their lack of sophistication, and willingness to believe what in retrospect are ridiculous lending plans.
But real estate is not the end of it. People can rationalize buying more than they can afford with consumer credit. I had a court coordinator ask me about bankruptcy. She told me she wanted to furnish her new house with credit (cards and rent-to-own), then file bankruptcy. Even after I told her the new debts would not be dischargable, she ran it up to over $20k.
My own father, who knows better because I've told him, took one of the last shitty ARMs out the door, and closed it without telling me, 'cause he knew I'd tell him that 9.5% to start, adjusting in 3 years with a guaranteed increase was shit. He needed the money to finance living in a neighboorhood that is beyond his means. He knows it. We've discussed it. He did it anyway.
I'm saying that there's varying degrees of guilt--someone who's blameless when bamboozled into a bad mortgage probably has screwed around with consumer credit, which is a bit easier to understand. If we try to put white hats on ourselves, and black hats on others, we risk missing the shades of grey and not learning the lessons that are to be had here.
You say, "As long as everyone was making money, nobody really cared. Not the Government, not the watchdogs, not the public at large."
...it's the government's job to care, it's the "watchdogs" job to care (because what else does a "watchdog" do, but watch and bark!?), and the public might have cared more if they had real information from people like Cramer, et al.
You say, "As long as everyone was making money -- or seeming to make money -- there was no impetus to act on anything."
There was no impetus to act if the "actors" (watchdogs, etc) are only working for the public that was making money. What a moronic statement to say that "everyone was making money." Everyone WHO MATTERED was making money, while many people continued to be poor.
You say, "As long as consumer credit was abundant, there was no reason to question the wisdom of basing 70% of our economy on consumer spending."
There was no reason to question it only if you're not given to questioning things. The problem with an economy based on consumption is painfully obvious.
You say, "As long as the stock market kept breaking records, there was no reason to assume that most retirees wouldn't be able to ride their 401Ks into their golden years."
This is true only if you ignore basic reasoning that says something can't go up forever. It also requires that you ignore all the people who have been predicting this collapse for years...and the few, like this one, who predicted the time and the nature of the collapse precisely: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IU6PamCQ6zw
You say, "As long as home prices kept going up, there was no reason to think that subprime and "exotic" mortgages were not a good idea."
Accept for the notion that investing in something too "exotic" to understand goes against one of the tenets of free-market capitalism (which everyone must claim to believe in, even if they manifestly don't), namely that consumers should be INFORMED. Was it obvious only in retrospect that the very term "exotic" implies that the average person might not understand it?
You say, "And because there was a gigantic, global pool of money that needed to be invested somewhere, nobody was really paying attention to the complex new investment tools financial players were busy creating."
There is no gigantic global pool of money just lying around waiting to be invested. There is paper wealth and there is real wealth. When something is created, wealth is created. When "complex investment tools" create numbers on a report, nothing is created but wastepaper.
But thanks for feeling sorry for Jim Cramer. I'm sure he appreciates it.
If the guys on CNBC were financial insiders they would be working at the best brokerage firms in Manhattan, not shilling their bullshit on T.V. Everyone who is not working at the center of power in NYC, is either investing their money according to the tried and true methods of mixing mostly low with some high risk stocks, or selling some kind of bogus system.
Study after economic study has shown that you might as well just invest according to the market index, unless you have enough money to benefit from the advice of the few peope who can maybe get you an extra %5 profit over the lifetime of your stock portfolio.
There was no rejoinder that Cramer could have made. Stewart's only mistake was not giving him enough rope to really hang himself with. But that would have made for a lot of dead air. And the interview was uncomfortable enough.
As long as we accept the "access" argument we should not expect real reportage. Journalists should have a slightly antagonistic relationship to those in power. (That is where the whole liberal bias meme came from in the first place- media commentors used to be more concerned with protecting their audience than their sources.) That is the reason they have a special right enumerated in the Bill of Rights...There is no reason the relationship should not be respectful but the idea that they need to fear pissing off those in power is voluntarily curtailing that very important freedom of the press.
Because of this very real problem that has developed - the clubiness of journalists and the powerful - we have come to rely on satirists for real information. During the previous administration which abused the access privilege as much as they could the Jon Stewarts of the world became ever more important as the only people left willing to speak truth to power. I think it is just a shame the Stewart/Cramer showdown didn’t happen earlier.
If you were paying attention at all it was not the slightest bit difficult to see the bubble building and this financial meltdown coming. You don’t have to be a financial expert or a genius. There was plenty of info – albeit mostly on PBS which is not exactly MSM but is also without any real barriers to access. Just for one example Bill Moyers has been covering the housing problem as it became apparent for at least the last two years. There were red flags all over the place. You’re right in the sense that people chose to ignore those problems because the money was flowing but that doesn’t mean they weren’t apparent.
Your argument ignores the fact that all of these troubles were brought on by a corrupt culture and ideology. Thirty years of anti-government governance brought us the situation ripe to be exploited by organizations and individuals. In fact in a corrupt culture it is hard to operate as a good actor- you can slog away and do the right thing but it is difficult when you see that colleague get the access you desire or your neighbor get the house you lust after by acting irresponsibly. When you can’t get ahead you go along and do the wrong thing- that is how corruption happens. The people that avoided that are the innocents who are being hurt by others behavior. But in the end the only way to change corruption is to fix the rules that are broken and forgive what has come before. Sort of like an amnesty after a conflict. Let everyone get back to their lives. But in order for things to get better we can’t accept the same corrupt behavior going forward or pretend that it just kinda happened that way and gosh who could have known. Maybe the financial meltdown needs its own truth and reconciliation process so we can understand it more thoroughly and not let it happen again.
Jon Stewart dominated him? But Cramer has had and will continue to have thousands upon thousands of hours of exposure on cable tv where he can shout and jump and ring cowbells to his heart's content.
And, as Stewart pointed out, he can use his position on television to say things that he knows are not true (e.g. false rumors about Apple) for the purpose of manipulating stock prices to his own financial advantage.
Cramer may find himself facing much tougher music than Jon Stewart.
Cramer made a fool out of himself. Stewart just got out of the way.
I liked the latter part of your post very much, but feeling sorry for Cramer? C'mon - he's a former hedge fund manager at Goldman Sachs who has admitted previously to violating the rules. He is a huckster showman masquerading as a financial analyst. Is Cramer bright? Yes. Is Cramer in love with attention? Yes. Is Cramer honest and therefore deserving of some sympathy? No.
Doing it, and being known for it, as in REALLY BEING KNOWN for it, are two different things.
Now, you can't blame him. But I believe you can't blame Cramer either. Cramer is more honest than just about any other financial analyst. But I don;t trust him on his stock recommendations, nor do I look to Jon Stewart for deep insightful financial advice.
The story of the stock market and the economy is as old as the hills. You can go back to John Law and the South Sea Bubble and find the same chicanery as Bernie Madoff. New and more sophisticated responses to managing the economy in whatever variety have yet to repeal the economic cycle. And for every regulator, there's a sharpie who figures out how to cobble around the regulation.
So our current depression should be no surprise. And like any otherr depression in history, it takes its own dynamic. Much of the hysteria surrounding Barack Obama's management of the economy is built on the same kind of reasoning that expects a man with severe meningitis, being admitted to the hospital, and then getting an instantaneous and 100% cure at the first injection.
One can only hope that the new forms of regulation and the sophistication of not only our government , but the G-20 will allow the wortld to get out of our morass as quickly as possible.
Ultimately. both Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart should be seen as what they really are -- big league entertainers who also have the shtick of being truth tellers. I will continue to believe both in Jim Cramer and Jon Stewart for that reason.
In the days leading up to it, of course, Cramer was flitting from show to show on NBC/MSNBC/CNBC talking about the riduculousness of being criticized by a -- Heavens!! -- comic cable show host.
Anyone who's ever watched Jon Stewart conduct a serious interview should have known to come prepared. (With a flack vest if nothing else.) Did Cramer think it was going to be Sesame Street?
Joe Scarborough enjoyed a good sneer earlier at the "nerve" of Stewart to comment on the conduct of a business show, but showed where his true journalistic values lay by walking away from the story Friday.
Only Rachel Maddow gave it any significant coverage, presumably against the wishes (orders?) of MSNBC higher-ups.
THERE'S a story in need of covering.
Sympathy for Cramer? Sell it to the occupants of the tent cities springing up across the nation.
I was a banker when deregulation was beginning to take form. I left the business because what baking was becoming wasn't a place for people who wanted to ensure that businesses and individuals thrived economically. Once lenders began to earn commissions instead of salaries, once businesses began to require their CEO's and CFO's to post annual and then semi-annual profits instead of long-term profits over five or more years, the breeding ground for greed began in earnest.
The average Americans' retirement pensions and 401K's had little input with their investment managers and where these funds were invested. It's hard to imagine that anyone actually thinks that average, working people were simply content to ride the big wave of making money when the big dogs made sure that their killing was grand enough to not only cripple the average consumer but in far too many cases, annihilate them without a blink.
Greed was the machine that drove this feeding frenzy, but the corporate titans were blessed with key people in Washington and the FDIC that ensured further deregulation of markets.
How many people do you know, not coprporate entities that were able to sway the market and win with 35 to 1 odds?
Stuart showed him to be a skeezy criminal scumbag, and that videotape he played of Cramer may result in his inditment, that is why he looked like he was going to cry thru most of the show. And what makes your idiotic opinion on the topic worthy of so many tedious paragraphs? I am but a humble carpenter, and even i knew it was a shell game, a house of cards propped up by BS and noise and nothing more... Cramer deserves a public flogging, that it was only a simple tongue lashing hardly seems enough..
Obviously, it doesn't help having Bernie Madoff on your show; he's not going to sit there and tell you: "Yeah, I know, my earnings look great. But it's really just a huge Ponzi scheme."
So what, exactly, is the point of having him on in the first place? If you're just going to give these people a venue to say anything they want without being challenged, you don't need to pay any reporters to be in the room with them. If guests gave a five minute speech, at least the viewer would realise that their statements have not been fact-checked by others. Networks provide cover for liars by pretending that their claims have been scrutinized and found to be sound, when in fact they have not been vetted at all.
The important fact that The Daily Show has exposed is that the big networks no longer produce much real journalism.
BULLSHIT!!!!!!
Jon Stewart isn't Bill O'Loufa and you know it. Cramer had tons of time to prepare before the show and once on it Jon never interrupted or talked over him the way the cable neo-fascists (aka. "Conservatives") do. The simple fact of the matter is Cramer had nothing. No explanation. No defense.
MSNBC is a tool for market manipulation.
Period.
Your inability to understand that simple fact, and your insistence on getting all gooey over the poor little Stavisky wannabes "feelings" is fucking pathetic!
Note the hue and cry that President Obama is doing, "too much, too soon"--- simply more code that the power brokers are finding themselves on the wrong side of the equation. That Steward chose to kick a man when he's down tarnishes his clown status. Of course there are "two markets", rich and poor alike darting in and out, creating a market. Now when the indices are unforgiving the many of us caught on the wrong side of reality have no justification to demand a mulligan. Where is it written that buying puts and selling calls guarantees nirvana? Any child realizes that there ain't no free lunch, no money back guarantee. I've read Cramer and have enjoyed his program as well as 'Fast Money'on CNBC. Any viewer looking for a silver bullet from such advice is foolish. Largely, there seems to be a pervasive Pollyannishness out there in 401k land. Whenever there's a ton of money, jackels will knaw at the fringe. Unregulated, disaster finds the core as it has in the past --- to 'smackdown' a good, honest, ethical financial news network is a bit too much, too convenient, too much of the Monday a.m. quarterbacking. I ask where was John Steward when the cows didn't come home?
I say BOOYAH proudly (with a grain of salt)!
Kinda missed the point there. Point was that CNBC wasn't good, wasn't honest, and definitely wasn't ethical. "Poor old" Cramer just happened to be their poster child. Both he and they thought they could get away with anything - and despite the Daily Show, they may yet be right.
Where was John "Steward?" Paying close enough attention to the facts (even though he's just a comedian) to be able to skewer that cheap flack AND the horse he rode in on.
Oh, and CNBC is definitely NOT for financial insiders - the insiders produce and slant the show for the poor little schmuck wannabes who have a few extra shekels to rub together. Remember them? Cramer's got their back, right?
http://www.usatoday.com/money/markets/2007-03-23-cramer-usat_N.htm
When I saw it then, I almost blew a gasket. Cramer admitted with amazing hubris to lying about companies for the sole purpose of manipulating the stock price. He then laughed at the SEC saying that they were impotent and would never do anything to him.
Anybody who would ever take financial advice from him is completely foolish. He would routinely buy a company's stock the day before pumping it on his show. Conversely, he would short stock the day before slamming it. Everybody who acted on his advice was purely feeding Cramer's profits at their own peril.
If you still have any pity left for this man, go watch the interview.
No, he was not the key culprit in all of this mess. However, he is nowhere close to getting what he deserved. He has admitted to what does constitute a crime. Has John Stewart pointed out, it was ironic that Martha Stewart has done jail time and not Jim Cramer.