Ed Brayton is a journalist, commentator and speaker. He is the co-founder and president of 
Until the last few days, I had no idea who Jim Cramer was. On occasion, while channel surfing, I would come across some lunatic ranting on CNBC, which only caused me to speed up my remote clicking and move on to the next channel without delay. I had no idea who that lunatic was, but now I know his name is Jim Cramer. And Jon Stewart has been going at this guy like a pinata the last week or so.
First he went after Rick Santelli for his incoherent rant on the floor of the stock exchange, showing clip after clip of CNBC analysts being flagrantly wrong on their statements about various companies:
Which then prompted this response from Cramer, claiming that he did not recommend buying Bear Stearns. Which leads to round 2 from Stewart:
And here's part three:
If I was Cramer, I'd give up on this. He's getting beaten like a drum.
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Comments
As bad as Cramer is, he is almost a paragon compared to DOW 36000 cokehead Kudlow, a man who has been in drug rehab at least twice for cocaine addiction. The fact that CNBC even allows a fucktard lke Larry Kudlow a microphone is a disgrace to broadcasting.
Posted by: SLC | March 12, 2009 9:16 AM
Apparently Cramer has decided to do the next best thing and go along with it. He's going to be on the Daily Show tonight.
Posted by: Taz | March 12, 2009 9:19 AM
The funniest part is that Cramer wasn't singled out in the original Daily Show episode, Santelli was, but not Cramer. So when Cramer suddenly starts doing the talk show circuit crying that he's being singled out he seems to scream of neglected middle child syndrome.
Posted by: echoegami | March 12, 2009 9:22 AM
I dunno, but it seems to me that it isn't hard to pick and choose the predictions that these guys make (who appear several times each day) to make a case that the guy is an idiot. That is not fair, especially when short clips that omit the caveats are used.
Cramer ain't dumb: his advice is generally well informed and conservative. TV has to have an entertainment aspect or advertisers go away, hence the showmanship, which is easy to disregard.
The remarks above about Kudlow strike me as way below the belt ("ad personem") and irrelevant.
Posted by: Thislin | March 12, 2009 9:37 AM
Then Joe Scarborough gets in on the act saying Stewart didn't do any better predicting the economic collapse. To which Stewart replies (obviously) that he wasn't pretending to know something about it and giving people bad advice. Smack. Down. Those lame-brains should have stuck with their first impulse which was to leave it alone.
Posted by: noel | March 12, 2009 9:45 AM
Actually, it's even worse. Here's a story about Cramer admitting to market manipulation.
Posted by: Ahcuah | March 12, 2009 9:52 AM
Re Thislin
The remarks above about Kudlow strike me as way below the belt ("ad personem") and irrelevant.
Apparently the National Review doesn't agree with Mr.Thislin as they dropped Kudlow from their magazine when they became aware of his coke snorting habits.
Posted by: SLC | March 12, 2009 9:55 AM
Stewart's point wasn't to simply mock these people for being wrong. It's for them being seriously and repeatedly wrong yet acting as if they are reliable sources on the same matters on which they have been wrong.
Take CNBC's "In Cramer We Trust" motto, for example.
Posted by: dslak | March 12, 2009 10:15 AM
Posted by: Eric | March 12, 2009 10:16 AM
Cramer's stock picking advice performs worse than a dartboard. Basically, if he can't manipulate the market or use inside information, he's no better than cow chip bingo.
Posted by: Argon | March 12, 2009 10:18 AM
I tend to keep tabs on Cramer writings on thestreet because he has given me investment ideas in areas that I hadn't considered before. Because of him - I got out of couple of areas right before they started dropping (e.g. real estate). And I generally like his books. That being said - anyone who takes stock tips from someone who blows a horn on a cable show is a downright idiot. That's the problem with Cramer - he comes off as a lunatic on his own show - its hard to take him seriously elsewhere.
Posted by: yoshi | March 12, 2009 10:22 AM
Stewart's job is to be funny. He succeeded. And with a lot of help from Cramer.
Posted by: Paul | March 12, 2009 10:24 AM
It will be fun watching Cramer appear on The Daily Show.
Many people underestimate Stewart when the appear on his show, and Cramer is just to sort of person to do exactly that.
If he's smart (???), he'll assume that Stewart is seriously prepared in addition to being funny.
Posted by: Jim Ramsey | March 12, 2009 10:26 AM
I dunno, but it seems to me that it isn't hard to pick and choose the predictions that these guys make (who appear several times each day) to make a case that the guy is an idiot.
Fortunes are made and lost every working day on Wall Street. So ask yourself this question: Assuming arguendo that Cramer, or anybody else appearing on these shows, knows anything about any specific stock that would make it a good investment, why would he tell it to a national TV audience? Sure, he might get some calls right. So would a monkey throwing darts.
And even his general advice can be bad. The first Daily Show segment included a clip in which Cramer admitted that stocks were overvalued (on a day when the Dow was somewhere north of 13k) but said that you should buy anyway. This notion is known as the Greater Fool Theory. It has an obvious flaw: there is only a finite supply of greater fools.
Posted by: Eric Lund | March 12, 2009 10:32 AM
Stewart went after CNBC not so much because of the bad predictions, but because of the idiotic stuff they've been saying lately. Like Santelli's absurd "I'm mad as hell and I'm not going to take it anymore" rant, and Cramer's pleading with the government to "think of the people being hurt". These jackasses refuse to admit that they were a large part of the problem
Posted by: Taz | March 12, 2009 10:38 AM
This is rather like criticizing Leno for being a deceitful political pundit. The Daily Show is a comedy show, not a news program. Editing clips to make people look like idiots is a mainstay of the program. Like most good comedians Stewart’s act draws from reality and will sometimes illuminate a real issue. But don’t confuse that with actual news. As Stewart himself said when he discovered that his show was the sole news source for a shockingly large number of people, "Don’t do that! We make stuff up."
Posted by: Abby Normal | March 12, 2009 10:55 AM
Cramer's entire schtick is to be a ranting madman. Criticizing him for that is besides the point; it's what he's there for.
Criticizing his acumen? Well....that's another point altogether...
Posted by: gwangung | March 12, 2009 11:07 AM
Exactly, Taz. The part that Stewart was initially attacking was CNBC's need to make up a story to explain why the market is working the way it is. Why did it go up today? Why did it go down for the last several months?
To truly answer these questions would require gathering large quantities of information and spending months analyzing it. Historians can answer why we entered the Great Depression, but a daily new analyst wouldn't know (and can't know) why the market is tumbling. Rather than admit ignorance about why the market behaves chaotically, the CNBC analysts have been weaving a narrative that places the blame on the new administration. They even said that the markets started tumbling in early 2008 because markets are forward-looking, and said seer-markets knew that Obama was going to be elected.
Pure partisan bullshiat, of course. However, such statements deflect placing blame on the people who buy and trade stocks and securities themselves. No need to reflect on your own policies if you can pin all the blame on someone else.
I know who I blame, and it's not Obama. I also do not fully blame the analysts, the traders, the bankers, the executives, the homeowners, the lenders, or even the Icelanders or the international financial system. I blame all of them, and the confluence of events and greed which led to the bubble and burst that is now affecting us all.
Posted by: Tenax | March 12, 2009 11:14 AM
Cramer's predictions vs. the Dow's behaviour for various stocks, 2009: http://blog.prospect.org/blog/ezraklein/cramer_prediction_graph.jpg
He gets the direction of the stocks' change in value right three times out of eighteen stocks, and gets the magnitude almost right once.
Posted by: James | March 12, 2009 11:26 AM
It's pretty much par for the course in financial analysis. The market is a giant, complex adaptive system, like an evolving ecology. Predicting stock fluctuations is like predicting the future allele frequencies of a population. CNBC is a useless channel.
Posted by: MZ | March 12, 2009 11:40 AM
Cramer's picks are probably no worse than a lot of other stock pickers, and his advice is generally well-informed and backed by plausible theories. Still, his overall record isn't great. And how could it be, when he picks one or two dozen stocks a week? I don't fault Cramer for his results, because I don't think anyone can do what he is trying to do; I fault him for trying at all.
Posted by: CJColucci | March 12, 2009 11:48 AM
Abby said - "As Stewart himself said when he discovered that his show was the sole news source for a shockingly large number of people, "Don’t do that! We make stuff up."
As opposed to the NBC network ... :) DJ
Posted by: DingoJack | March 12, 2009 11:50 AM
Actually it looks to me like he was almost right about the magnitude (a.k.a. absolute value) at least seven times. He just had the direction wrong on six out of seven. For example "T" he predicted at about +23% and it ended up about -21%, only a 2 point variance in magnitude.
Yea, I’m a pedantic prick today. ;-)
Posted by: Abby Normal | March 12, 2009 12:08 PM
Abby Normal said:
And yet, The Daily Show often has this ability to cut right to the heart of the matter that I have rarely seen on any other news network. At least not before Rachel Maddow got her own show.
Posted by: Beowulff | March 12, 2009 12:29 PM
This illustrates why the Daily Show is so much fun. On normal news shows, you can claim that you didn't say stupid thing X, or that you only said it once and you were taken out of context. They'll never call you on it. Stewart and company will. They'll go through the archives and get every instance of you saying stupid thing X.
You'd think that anybody who lied about their positions or predictions while being recorded would get caught every time without having the court jester do the legwork, but apparently not.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | March 12, 2009 12:36 PM
Cracked Magazine declared Jim Cramer the fourth worst source of advice on television. http://www.cracked.com/article_16988_5-worst-sources-advice-on-television.html in one of there more mature write-ups.
Posted by: Flying Fox | March 12, 2009 12:57 PM
Posted by: Taz | March 12, 2009 1:08 PM
This is what I don't understand. Why don't they? How come news exists only in the present tense? Actually, they're willing to go past tense if someone got laid. But other than that, why only present tense? Is the (unsexy) past irrelevant?
Posted by: pough | March 12, 2009 1:13 PM
"As Stewart himself said when he discovered that his show was the sole news source for a shockingly large number of people, "Don’t do that! We make stuff up."
And this is different from Fox News how exactly?
Posted by: dogmeatib | March 12, 2009 1:17 PM
Because as Taz noted, the "news" shows need access to these people to fill time, and frankly there is damned little incentive to undercut such "experts". "News", especially on television, has very little to do with real journalism any more, and much more to do with entertainment.
Posted by: Tulse | March 12, 2009 2:17 PM
"As Stewart himself said when he discovered that his show was the sole news source for a shockingly large number of people, "Don’t do that! We make stuff up.""
Which gives Stewart a great deal more credibility as a news source than Fox News.
Posted by: TomTallis | March 12, 2009 2:48 PM
Yet such has been the roll of the fool throughout history, to see and say what others can or will not. John Stewart is the torchbearer of a long tradition, from the satires of Aristophanes, to Shakespeare's jesters, to the more contemporary Mark Twain and Will Rogers. There is a special power in humor, an ability to say things that would otherwise be condemned. Sadly, speaking the truth is often one of those dangerous acts. ("If you speak the truth, have a foot in the stirrup." -Turkish proverb) So to get away with it, the dangerous statements must often be wrapped in absurdity, misdirection, and nonsense. Comedy is a kind of fiction. So, yes Stewart can communicate truth, even precipitate profound new insights, but only by distorting or sacrificing the facts.
Oh, and I can't wait to see Stewart and Cramer going tête-à-tête tonight. The jester verses the buffoon. They should put it on Pay-Per-View.
Posted by: Abby Normal | March 12, 2009 4:34 PM
He admits it.
Posted by: Smidgy | March 12, 2009 6:20 PM
Yeah, his post went up while I was typing mine. I keep forgetting to be more cynical.
Posted by: pough | March 12, 2009 6:23 PM
Cramer's a BUFFOON of giant proportions. His endless ranting and self alledged stock picking prowess is nothing short of an embarrassment. Thank goodness his picks have centered around individual stocks rather than concentrating on mutual funds where he could have done even more damage.
As if individual investors haven't suffered more than enough financial hardship recently, here they are being bombarded with stock picks from Cramer that unfortunately usually lose money.
I have chosen to stick to what I know - Mutual Funds -
Feel free to peruse mutualfundwealth.com for investinging strategies that are feasible and make profits from your investments. It's your hard earned money, make it work for you regardless of market conditions.
Doug T........The fund guy
Posted by: Doug T | March 12, 2009 6:39 PM
Wait, wait, wait... Kudrow's the crackhead? Who's Kudrow? Was he getting his supply from Cramer by any chance? Just look at the guy- Sweaty, twitchy, red-faced and ranting. Running around the set banging on shit like a kindergartner with ADD in a toy store. On crack. And Mt. Dew.
Who would be stupid enough to take financial advice from this guy O.o
Jesus christ, no wonder everything's tanking. People actually listen to this ass hat? Something tells me that I'd still be better off if the Daily Show was my only source of news.
Posted by: Leni | March 12, 2009 7:29 PM
Larry Kudlow's use of drugs goes back at least a dozen years and he says he's off the stuff now. I would give him the benefit of a doubt and judge his advice for what it is.
Cramer really does know a great deal about the market. He can tell you the PE ratio and earnings projections on most stocks in the market and probably knows the principals personally.
That makes his stock predictions even more troubling.
If an expert like Cramer (and he is an expert) can get is *so* wrong the average person should stay way clear of the whole enterprise.
I learned that the hard way after trading for nine years. The game is rigged and unless you subscribe to the 'but its the only game in town' philosophy you should stay away from it and all of its aspects.
Posted by: James Brown | March 12, 2009 8:25 PM
I imagine there are a lot of professionals out there who know just as much as Cramer does. Professionals who don't run around a televised playpen banging on shit and waving papers around like a madman.
If I walked into my broker's office and he or she was banging on a freaking gong, playing fart noises on a sampler, wearing a clownsuit and screaming at me I'd probably just find another broker.
Cramer could not possibly be good enough to make for this offense. LOL there's just no way.
Posted by: Leni | March 12, 2009 9:07 PM
ROFL, "Turdmining". I'm gonna use that!
Posted by: Alex Deam | March 12, 2009 9:59 PM
He's a tv presenter. Sure, he used to work in the world of finance, but that doesn't make him an expert. He knows the "PE ratio and earnings projections" because of the magic of scriptwriters, teleprompters and google.
Posted by: Alex Deam | March 12, 2009 10:04 PM
Holy shit.
Watching Daily Show right now. I would bear Jon Stewart's babies at this point. Difficult for a male. Cramer gets some kudos for showing up and for mostly standing up and taking his beating. But wow.
Amazing.
Posted by: Anon | March 12, 2009 11:17 PM
Yes, I think this is a case of, "What kind of asshole sailor would trust the wacky weatherman anyway?" Something about the delivery should tell you that something is wrong.
Posted by: Troublesome Frog | March 12, 2009 11:19 PM
I know what you mean Anon. Jon keeps throwing up these clips of him, and he's completely reduced to franticly mumbling excuses, trying to justify himself.
Epic. Fail.
Posted by: doctorgoo | March 12, 2009 11:22 PM
But Stewart is also doing a good job of keeping it from being just about Cramer. John does a good job of showing that Cramer has become one of the faces of a systemic problem.
Posted by: Taz | March 12, 2009 11:29 PM
Just a thought, but when you say things on TV, at least since the invention of videotape, you probably shouldn't deny having said them. It just makes you look even stoopider.
Y'know, just sayin'.
Posted by: BaldApe | March 13, 2009 12:35 PM
The stock market pundit industry has always been 99% garbage. WSJ and CNBC are good for business gossip, stating the obvious, and passing off pseudocredible explanations. That's it. The experts know this, and rely on the masses doing stupid things, so don't expect any changes. I recall a quantitative analyst job interview where I was shown a WSJ column, and was asked to explain why it's ridiculous nonsense. Piece of cake.
Jim Cramer is merely the most openly clownish. Whatever sells, sells.
There was a case about two years where a major stock market data provider was caught allowing analysts to back change some of their listed predictions.
Posted by: william e emba | March 13, 2009 12:45 PM