Something constructive has come of the Santelli rant after all, albeit through a rather circuitous route. The above video is the meatier portion of the whole escapade thus far. After being taunted by NBC for just being a comedian, taking things out of context, and making funny faces, Jon Stewart had Cramer on his show and conducted the interview in a more serious and constructive manner than you will see any of the so-called journalists who leveled these accusations do themselves. Cramer was friendly and apologetic, so this must have been a hard thing to do to the man, but Stewart met any evasions with career crushing force. There have been responses from most of the major media and the White House.
CNN has a poll up that asks readers whether they see this interview as being a comic diversion or serious business. Comedy is winning 52-48. This shows a fundamental lack of understanding of what went down. A bit of background for those of you not well versed in investing; a short is when a broker sells you an investment they don’t own because they think it will go down. They intend to take your money, and when the stock goes down and you wish to sell, they just give you some of your money back and pocket the rest. Kind of like a Ponzi scheme, in the sense that if the stock market booms and everyone wants their money, we see a whole new scandal. This is legal. Some of what he was admitting to doing was not. Listen carefully to the clips Stewart plays, rewind if you have to, but make sure you understand what Cramer was admitting to. He isn’t a rogue bad apple. This is business as usual and whole system is full of rot. The government is rotten, the banks are rotten, as are the analysts, the brokers, the corporations, the media, and the investors. This isn’t something we can just make more rules against. This isn’t a failure of the free market. The people who make the rules are the same people breaking them. What we need is simple transparency. Jon Stewart has given us a taste.
Found you on Secular Right.
Your comments re the Cramer vs. Stewart brouhaha are right on. But I think many of us who watch Cramer do so for precisely the entertainment values, not because we’re stock pickers or traders.
As Megan McArdle has said, there’s no money to be made over the long term in trading stocks. You can do better staying in indexes. If Cramer made a pile short selling–though some contend his hedge fund was a flop–and now condemns the practice, why should he be blamed for his success? Or changing his mind? Should we impose a hypocrisy tax?
Stewart has his own agenda, as everyone knows. Using Cramer as the whipping boy for all of CNBC’s notoriety as shills for the market seems like mindless Wall Street bashing. Just like Obama does. I no more believe in “In Cramer We Trust” than I believe in “In Government We Trust”–the very government whose regulatory agencies liberals so love, and which agencies are (see Fannie and Freddie) at the root of what’s been happening to my 401k.
People do need to take responsibility for their own investing and to a large extent consider it gambling. I can see Cramer’s show as part comedy, but this interview was quite serious.
The way I interpreted what he was saying, I got the impression he was using his position to the detriment of his own investors because he was short. Somehow, when these guys flop, they manage to walk away with full pockets. It isn’t so much hypocrisy as fraud.
I don’t especially approve of short selling. I think it is ok as long as all involved parties understand it is being done. In a Ponzi scheme, the whole thing collapses when the economy is down, thus deepening the crash. In a shorting scheme, the collapse comes in a boom, which may actually help the economy as a whole, but try to tell that to tho victims.
I agree with you about the government rather than the market being the root of the problem, but I didn’t see this interview as mindless Wall Street bashing. It seemed quite targeted at those who sought to profit at the expense of those who had been investing their retirement under the cultivated illusion of stability. Those investors should have known better, but Cramer hardly has any ethical high ground.
I find myself of two minds on the current state of the nation, as we extremists must in order to exist within a system so far from what we consider ideal. At this point I often think the left is preferable to the center even though it is farther from my goal. Our current system privatized profits and socialized losses truly seems the worst of both worlds.