“You can’t foment. That’s a violation… You can’t create yourself an impression that a stock’s down, but you do it anyway because the SEC doesn’t understand it. But a hedge fund that’s not up a lot really has to do a lot now to save itself, so … this is different from what I was talking about at the beginning where I was buying the Q’s (?) and stuff. This is a … just blatantly illegal, but when you have six days and your company may be in doubt because you are down, I think it is really important to foment, if I were one of these guys.”
–Jim Cramer, December 22, 2006
That’s from a video made for and by TheStreet.com. I was exposed to it last night on The Daily Show. To me, it was the clips shown from that one video (currently available on YouTube) that were the most damning things Jon Stewart threw at Jim Cramer last night†. Not that there wasn’t a lot of damning things thrown at Cramer during the course of the show-long interview. Boiled down to its essence, Jon Stewart smacked Jim Cramer’s dick into a lemon cream pie. There wasn’t anything funny about The Daily Show last night, but it did make for good TV viewing.
If you haven’t been keeping up with the Cramer vs. Stewart battle of words, and I imagine many people haven’t been, it started on Monday night, when Jon Stewart blasted CNBC for their lack of foresight concerning the impending economic situation we now find ourselves in. He didn’t single out Cramer for abuse, but attacked the entire cabal of talking financial heads at the network. Stewart’s guest that night was supposed to be Rick Santelli, who was recently getting a lot of news coverage for this recent on-air rant††.
“The government is promoting bad behavior… I’ll tell you what, I have an idea. The new Administration’s big on computers and technology. How about this, President and new Administration, why don’t you put up a Web site to have people vote on the Internet as a referendum to see if we really want to subsidize the loser’s mortgages, or would we like to at least buy cars and buy houses in foreclosure and give them to people who might have a chance to actually prosper down the road and reward people who actually carry the water instead of drink the water…”
“This is America. How many of you people want to pay for your neighbors’ mortgages that has an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”
–Rick Santelli, CNBC
Santelli had more sense than Cramer. He ducked out of his appearance on The Daily Show at the last minute. Cramer decided, quite foolishly, to take offense at Stewart’s poking CNBC, and started talking back. After all, Jim Cramer is a financial analyst on CNBC, and Jon Stewart is just a comedian. A comedian! What could Stewart possibly know about anything?! Well, Stewart is smart, and he’s go fantastic staff who love nothing more than to dig through hours of video and internet archives looking for damning clips and quotes. Cramer would have been wise, since he was not the sole topic of the original rant about CNBC, to have kept his mouth shut and ignored it. But he didn’t, because Stewart is a comedian.
“A comedian attacking me. Wow. He runs a variety show”
–Jim Cramer, The Today Show
A word to the wise: if you feel you have been attacked by The Daily Show and must say something about it, do not say it on national TV first thing in the morning. You will get skewered for it that night. And that’s exactly what happened, and kept happening, because Cramer kept going on other TV shows and fighting back … against this comedian he felt he was better than and who he woefully underestimated.
So every night this week, The Daily Show skewered Cramer, and every morning, Cramer fought back. It’s been highly entertaining, and last night it culminated with the show-long interview of Cramer on The Daily Show. I don’t know why he went on the show. I imagine he thought he’d come out of it looking good, that Stewart, being just a comedian on a “variety show”, couldn’t possibly make him look bad. Well, Cramer looked bad, and Jon Stewart effectively won the war of words. Never underestimate a comedian. I’ve known more than a few, and every last one of them was sharper than your average tack. The stupid ones don’t get their own TV shows, or if they do, they don’t last long.
You can watch the complete episode of last night’s Daily Show here, and all this week’s Cramer bits from The Daily Show are currently featured on the front page at the show’s web site. Definitely worth watching. It’s some pretty serious stuff, with just a little funny on top. Not your usual Daily Show. Also the show-long interview, something I don’t recall ever happening on The Daily Show in all the years I’ve been watching it, ran longer than the show, so there are outtakes … a lot of outtakes. Almost another whole show worth of outtakes. I haven’t watched them yet, so I’m going to embed them behind the cut and go make some more coffee. I have the feeling, the outtakes are going to be really, really tasty with coffee†††. I love it when Jon gets angry.
Time to go make coffee and feed the cats, so I can have a good chunk of peaceful time to watch all these videos!
Why the hell do embedded Comedy Central videos always have crappy formatting on my blog?! No matter what I do, I can’t correct the top bar to make it fit with the rest of the video. So annoying.
Footnotes- † There were a lot of damning things in this Cramer video, especially how he suggested how easily Apple stock could be manipulated with lies and rumor-mongering. This video, by the way, was made shortly before the MacWorld Expo at which the iPhone was presented, so his comments on how to drive the stock down by rumor-mongering about Verizon and AT&T not liking the iPhone is interesting, to say the least. I’m no financial expert, but I’m pretty damn sure this kind of thing is excessively illegal. [↩]
- †† The whole Santelli rant is worth watching, if your blood pressure can handle it. What an ass. [↩]
- ††† Full disclosure: I hate Jim Cramer. He’s on the list of people I don’t allow to appear on my TV screen, right up there with Bill O’Reilly and Nancy Grace (to name a few). Getting to see him have his dick handed to him by Stewart was delicious to me. I can’t wait to watch the episode again and to see what the outtakes contain. [↩]
Cramer fills the role of investment adviser in the same way Limbaugh acts as a political analyst; both shill for their respective employers. Since they are both entertainers (both, I believe, card-carrying SAG members), they can’t be held responsible for their representations. They earn their keep by drumming up business in the same way a sidewalk barker tries to get guys into a strip bar.
As long as stupid people have money and votes, there will be hucksters after them.
Cramer’s speculations on what the market will or will not do are 46% accurate. Hell, I could toss a coin and do better than that! I remember years ago we were flipping through the TV channels, since nothing interesting was on, and ran across him being insane. it took me about five minutes to realize this was someone I did not need to listen to. A huckster. A snake-oil salesman. Oh, I cannot stand the man and all the others that are just like him but more low-key in presentation. I can smell someone trying to sell me something I don’t need a mile away. Con men.
While I enjoy watching Cramer every night, one must remember the show is primarily entertainment. The financial networks exist to promote their advertisers financial and investment products. Who would expect them to warn about the credit bubble or coming Washington national debt collapse which will destroy much of the remaining private wealth in America today or what this will do to the dollar, the stock market, bonds, gold or the real estate market?
China is now worried about their dangerous over investment in US Treasury obligations. Washington ’s long-term choice is either repudiation or monetization. For monetization to be effective, the depreciation in the dollar would have to be substantial and this in turn would dramatically raise prices of imports for American consumers which would mean a tremendous drop in foreign imports. Debt monetization would cause more disruption to exporting nations than selective repudiation of Treasury debt.
The Campaign to Cancel the Washington National Debt By 12/22/2013 Constitutional Amendment is starting now in the U.S. See: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67594690498&ref=ts
Thanks,
Ron with 30 plus years in the investment business and banking industry.