Jon Stewart’s indictment of CNBC
Last night I featured a video from Jon Stewart that skewered CNBC, and specifically Jim Cramer. The video is quite funny as Jon Stewart’s show is a comedy show.
However, since that segment aired, Jon Stewart has decided to end the comedy and take a much harder and more serious tone on this issue. Today I would like to highlight last night’s Jon Stewart interview with Jim Cramer because it is not funny. It is an indictment of CNBC, of Jim Cramer, and of the entire financial media as a complicit enabler of the most prolific credit bubble in history.
I am not making a statement here one way or another. But, I do feel these are clips everyone should see. They are quite sobering. Warning: these videos contain strong language.
Update 912AM EDT: The guys over at FT Alphaville have an interesting take on all of this. Read Izabella Kaminska’s article here: Cramer capitulates.
And Barry Ritholtz has a good take as well: Anti-Climax: Cramer vs. Stewart.
Related articles
Busted: CNBC Sleaze Jim Cramer Blabs on How He Shorted Stocks and Manipulated Markets – AlterNet
Former GOP Rep. wants Cramer ‘looked at’ for market manipulation – Raw Story
Jim Cramer, when he’s not outright wrong, is too little too late. When he gave the sell signal in October 2008, it was at least 4 months too late. It’s inconceivable that he did not foresee the panic of ’08 well in advance, given his knowledge of the markets: the insane over-leveraging by the banks and financial institutions, the massive fraud and corruption in the mortgage industry and on Wall St. (the “Bezzle”), the subprime mortgage meltdown that had been swelling for over a year, the housing bubble that was bursting, the collapse of Bear Stearns in March, government conservatorship and bailout of Freddy and Fanny in September, the implosion of Lehman in September, the MBS derivatives, CDS and CDO practices, the steady rise in unemployment, the steady drop in retail sales, a 70% consumer GDP, and last but not least, the massive levels of both public and private debt.
Love when the critics , who have no clue , come out of the woodwork with their Monday Morning Quarterbacking
How about forecasting what will happpen in the future , rather than critiquing what happened in the past . A chimp can do that , it’s no great skill and is a huge waste of energy
Tell me the future …. and how to fix our problems .
Ive been thinking about this sort of issue lately. How much impact does the popular media have on market climate and direction? A website like CNBC certainly seems to present the full spectrum of the economic opinion from the extreme to the moderate.
I found an interesting bit of data using Google’s Trends tool. If you search ‘cnbc’ you will find that most Google searches for that term come from India and the second most come from Singapore. The US is third, Turkey is fourth.
Now, because the data is based on the number of searches using the term ‘cnbc’, we end up with some doubts as to what the data means. For instance, maybe cnbc means something else in India? Or, maybe most Indians dont know that the address is a simple cnbc.com? However, it does beg the question “How many market participants are getting their information from a popular website like cnbc.com?” I have done a bit more work on this beyond what I mention here, but it is still hard to get something definitive.
The ultimate question is whether websites like cnbc contribute to self fulfilling prophecy? On the other hand, it has been clear that no one really knows how bad things have been or where we might go from here (just look at that GDP surprise) so maybe cnbc does represent a good sampling of opinions?