I Like BOTH Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer
I don't understand this big war between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer. I actually like BOTH of these guys. They are BOTH intelligent, thought-provoking people. I tend to think that Stewart, in this instance, is in the wrong.
Jon Stewart is undoubtedly very clever and very funny. However, like most comedians, he simplifies things down to black & white, right & wrong, smart & dumb. That is the nature of comedy. You simplify down to smart & dumb, then you laugh at what appears to be dumb. But when you analyze it further, most issues are not that simple. But we laugh at comedian's jokes, but we don't necessarily agree with the concepts totally.
Two good examples are Chris Rock and Jackie Mason. Chris Rock simplifies black & white stereotypes down to the point that they are funny. But are they really accurate? I doubt it.
Similarly, Jackie Mason simplified Jewish stereotypes down to the point that they appeared funny. But in truth, some would say that Jackie Mason was the flip side of anti-semitism, while Chris Rock is the flip side of racism. And both of these people would make some very, very dubious generalizations, which we think are funny, but if we look more closely, they are not.
Jim Cramer, on the other hand, is a brilliant market analyst. He does, in fact, have an enormously successful track record. He had enormous success managing an investment fund, so he is not just blowing it out his behind. He knows what he is talking about.
And Jim Cramer is, in fact, quite correct to dismiss Jon Stewart as "a comedian" who knows virtually nothing about the market or investing.
While it is true that a person should not just immediately run out and invest all of their money in Jim Cramer's picks, I don't think that Cramer is intending that. If someone is dumb enough to do that, then they deserve to lose their money.
Cramer specifically states that people who really NEED their money, and can't afford to lose it, should NOT be investing in the stock market. I have heard him say that EXPLICITLY.
However, if you are playing around with some "mad money" in the market, it is not a bad idea to listen to Cramer's tips and further investigate them. I see nothing the matter with that.
I also see nothing the matter with Cramer yelling and screaming. I think that he tells it like it is. If a company is full of crap, he says it out loud. If a company is good, he also says it out loud, and he gives the reasons for his opinions, which are well researched. What's the matter with that? And I think that he knows what he's talking about.
Also, Cramer is EXTREMELY funny. With his various sound effects and prompts and gesticulations, he is virtually as funny as Stewart. Maybe Stewart is jealous?
I also don't understand the bad-mouthing of CNBC. CNBC is one of the most RELEVANT stations on TV. MSNBC gives you a bunch of mealy-mouthed liberal propaganda, and Fox News gives you a bunch of mealy-mouthed conservative propaganda, while HLN tells you about the latest child-murdering. C-Span has the potential to be worthwile, but they spend too much time on super-boring Washington junk.
So I watch CNBC A LOT. I see nothing the matter with it.
Oh yeah, Kudlow is a dork. He just spews a bunch of rightwing crap. But CNBC in general is not a rightwing-crap-spewing station.
Business is a serious discipline. It is just as serious as History or Sociology or Anthropology, and it is extremely important to understand. I see nothing wrong with having at least one station devoted to business analysis.
Draft 1: 3/16/09
Jon Stewart is undoubtedly very clever and very funny. However, like most comedians, he simplifies things down to black & white, right & wrong, smart & dumb. That is the nature of comedy. You simplify down to smart & dumb, then you laugh at what appears to be dumb. But when you analyze it further, most issues are not that simple. But we laugh at comedian's jokes, but we don't necessarily agree with the concepts totally.
Two good examples are Chris Rock and Jackie Mason. Chris Rock simplifies black & white stereotypes down to the point that they are funny. But are they really accurate? I doubt it.
Similarly, Jackie Mason simplified Jewish stereotypes down to the point that they appeared funny. But in truth, some would say that Jackie Mason was the flip side of anti-semitism, while Chris Rock is the flip side of racism. And both of these people would make some very, very dubious generalizations, which we think are funny, but if we look more closely, they are not.
Jim Cramer, on the other hand, is a brilliant market analyst. He does, in fact, have an enormously successful track record. He had enormous success managing an investment fund, so he is not just blowing it out his behind. He knows what he is talking about.
And Jim Cramer is, in fact, quite correct to dismiss Jon Stewart as "a comedian" who knows virtually nothing about the market or investing.
While it is true that a person should not just immediately run out and invest all of their money in Jim Cramer's picks, I don't think that Cramer is intending that. If someone is dumb enough to do that, then they deserve to lose their money.
Cramer specifically states that people who really NEED their money, and can't afford to lose it, should NOT be investing in the stock market. I have heard him say that EXPLICITLY.
However, if you are playing around with some "mad money" in the market, it is not a bad idea to listen to Cramer's tips and further investigate them. I see nothing the matter with that.
I also see nothing the matter with Cramer yelling and screaming. I think that he tells it like it is. If a company is full of crap, he says it out loud. If a company is good, he also says it out loud, and he gives the reasons for his opinions, which are well researched. What's the matter with that? And I think that he knows what he's talking about.
Also, Cramer is EXTREMELY funny. With his various sound effects and prompts and gesticulations, he is virtually as funny as Stewart. Maybe Stewart is jealous?
I also don't understand the bad-mouthing of CNBC. CNBC is one of the most RELEVANT stations on TV. MSNBC gives you a bunch of mealy-mouthed liberal propaganda, and Fox News gives you a bunch of mealy-mouthed conservative propaganda, while HLN tells you about the latest child-murdering. C-Span has the potential to be worthwile, but they spend too much time on super-boring Washington junk.
So I watch CNBC A LOT. I see nothing the matter with it.
Oh yeah, Kudlow is a dork. He just spews a bunch of rightwing crap. But CNBC in general is not a rightwing-crap-spewing station.
Business is a serious discipline. It is just as serious as History or Sociology or Anthropology, and it is extremely important to understand. I see nothing wrong with having at least one station devoted to business analysis.
Draft 1: 3/16/09
posted by Jack W. Orf | 2:47 PM
3 Comments:
"I thought Bear Stearns was honest." Jim Cramer.
I don’t believe this.
I think that Jim Cramer believed that the guys who ran Bear Stearns would pull the same kind of deceptive shenanigans in order to line their own pockets that Cramer pulled when he ran his own hedge fund. Cramer might have thought that there was some limit to what those guys would pull and that wherever that limit lay, there would still be a piece of the pie left over for the shareholders. That is not at all the same thing as thinking they were honest.
This is where I think Jon Stewart nailed it. I don’t think Jim Cramer knew that Bear Stearns was going to collapse. I do think he knew the kind of things that people on Wall Street do to make money and I think he understood the ways in which the interests of the guys running the firms diverge from the interests of the shareholders. The problem is not that the executives at Bear Stearns were not exposed to declines in the stock. The problem is that the benefits of short-term high-risk strategies were enjoyed to a much greater extent by the executives than by the shareholders while the risks were shared equally. This is what I think Cramer understood without ever trying to make his audience understand.
The bonuses at AIG illustrate the problem perfectly. The compensation of the executives who wrote the credit default swaps was structured in such a way that they are entitled to millions of dollars in bonuses even though there actions brought down the company and cost the taxpayers of the United States billions upon billions of dollars. The scale may be enough to shock Cramer, but the basic methodology shouldn't be.
To be honest, you seem to be more familiar with the details than I am. I'm not a regular listener to Cramer, so I've only casually listened to his stock picks. Usually, he seems to focus on specific companies, rather than amorphous beasts like Bear Stearns.
But I think that he has been pretty straight-forward with listeners. He has even said that people should not invest in the stock market unless they are using truly discretionary income.
Indeed, one of the definitions of "Mad Money" given by the Wiktionary is: (idiomatic) A sum of money, often relatively small in amount, kept in reserve to use for impulsive, frivolous purposes.
So as long as people take Cramer's advice simply to play around with Mad Money, I don't think that he's all that harmful. Also, there isn't any evidence that he did anything illegal when he ran his own fund, is there?
There's nothing the matter with running a fund, if you're honest and you make money for people.
Jack W. Orf
As Stewart noted, it was unfortunate that Cramer became the face of the thing and it only happened because Rick Santelli chickened out. While I think that Cramer has failed to tell his audience things that it would have been useful for them to know, I think he is much more self-aware than most of the personalities on CNBC and much more likely to be honest about what goes on. I think took his spanking so docilely because he realized the legitimacy of Stewarts complaints.
I really would have liked to see Stew art get a crack at Larry Kudlow. Kudlow continues to spout the libertarian rhetoric that all government regulation is bad. I would like to here him admit that the meltdown that occurred in credit default swaps and mortgage backed securities occurred in the least regulated area of the credit markets. I would also like him to acknowledge that these areas were the least regulated because libertarians like Alan Greenspan believed that financial institutions should be allowed to police themselves.
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home