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Saturday, April 19, 2014

Jim Cramer vs. Jim Cramer on the Market

     I remember a few years ago, when Jon Stewart brought Cramer on his show and reamed him out. I mean it was painful to watch.

     "Tonight we had the big face-off, the heavyweight bout, the Super Bowl square-off between CNBC's Jim Cramer and Comedy Central's Jon Stewart. Cramer was especially upset about being included in a segment TDS produced on the horrible and almost criminal reporting CNBC has been airing as THE go-to business network after CNBC's Rick Santelli attacked average working-class people who got caught up in the sub-prime mortgage crisis. Santelli dubbed them as "losers." Well, the only loser tonight was Cramer and CNBC.
Jim basically sat there, starry-eyed like a lost puppy, and was virtually silent throughout the three-segment show featuring him. He basically waved the white flag and said,"You got me."
     http://www.thewire.com/business/2011/05/jim-cramers-still-bitter-2009-spat-jon-stewart/37699/
Jon Stewart hammered Jim Cramer and his network, CNBC, in their anticipated face-off on "The Daily Show," repeatedly chastising the "Mad Money" host for putting entertainment above journalism.
"I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a ... game," Stewart told Cramer, adding in an expletive during the show's Thursday taping. The episode was scheduled to air at 11 p.m. EDT on Comedy Central Cramer insisted he was devoted to revealing corporate "shenanigans," to which Stewart retorted: "It's easy to get on this after the fact."
At one point, Cramer sounded the reformed sinner, responding to Stewart's plea for more levelheaded, honest commentary: "How about I try that?" said Cramer. "I'll do that."
By the end, the two-segment interview went far beyond its allotted time. Comedy Central said the on-air version would be cut by about eight minutes, though the entire interview would be available unedited on ComedyCentral.com on Friday.

     Yet I still never really thought that Stewart gets it. He saw it in terms of  Cramer and friends doing shoddy jounralism but that's not it. Cramer is not a news reporter and that's not why people tune into his show. He basically kind of is like a wolf retiring from the game of eating sheep to supposedly instruct the sheep how to evade wolves in the future. 

    I love his show. Now in the segment that got Stewart's ire Cramer might have seemed a little different than he does on his show. Yet I really had a totally different take on it than Stewart-I don't find this morally horrifying or repugnant. Here he is on that old segment of his he used to call Wall Street Confidential. 

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMShFx5rThI

     I don't doubt that this is closer to the 'real Cramer'-but still, he's giving the public knowledge. It depends on how you approach it-Stewart is just some outraged muckraker on steroids-who seems to think he inhabits a very black and white moral universe-I watch Cramer for market knowledge. No question if you are trying to make money in the market he's a guy you want to listen to. That he doesn't tell the Mad Money audeince everything he knows is someting that doesn't stun me-I'd be stunned if it were the opposite. 

     When he talks about the ability of a hedge fund to put $5 million dollars in a stock before the market opens to raise a stock-and then take it all off once the market opens leading all the 'moron longs' as he calls them to jump out so he can win his own short position in a stock this is something worth knowing about. It enables a market particpant to perofrom better not worse. So I tend to disagree with Stewart. I'm a liberal-though even here I haven't been such a fan of his lately as he spends too much time bashing Obama and playing the 'both sides do it' game-but this is the market it's not PBS and now life wouldn't be better if Cramer tried to make his show a PBS segment. 

    Cramer still remembers it bitterly-or did back in 2011 two years after it happened. 

     "In the Times Magazine, Chafets asks Cramer about his dust-up with Stewart. Cramer's response doesn't exactly suggest that he's moved on: "The old me would have hit Stewart with a chair. I'm proud I didn't do that. I controlled myself. But maybe I shouldn't have. Maybe I should have taken the gloves off."
Actually, that's just a bit of what Cramer says. "After the interview, people like that, total strangers, would come up to me and say, 'Jim, I’m sorry,'" he tells Chafets. "That made me feel horrible, people feeling sorry for me. For six months it was on my mind all the time. I hurt so bad."

    "Cramer's conversation with Chafets takes place in a diner, and when he's talking about the Stewart feud, he raises his voice so loud that people start leaning in to listen. Eventually Cramer says he's over it: "I don't really think about it now." Then he goes on to compare it to a Kesselschlact, a German term that Nazis would use to t describe "battles of total annihilation." It sure sounds like he's made his peace."

      http://www.thewire.com/business/2011/05/jim-cramers-still-bitter-2009-spat-jon-stewart/37699/

     Here was a big New Yorker piece on Cramer where we get into the Cramer-Stewart dust up in more detail. 

      http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/15/magazine/jim-cramer-hits-an-all-time-high.html

      P.S. I disagree with Stewart on Cramer a bit but not on Rick Santelli-whose 'famous rant' launched the Tea Party movement.' Certainly Santelli deserved to get skewered. 

     

     

     

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