Look, I'm personally in a financial no-mans-land of the young or arrested-developed: starting a job, paying off college debt, renting, no house, single wage-earner, attempting to pay off enormous onerous credit card debt accumulated during college and grad school, and until relatively recently, uninsured; so it's not like the financial crisis *directly* effected my personal assets, because they are effectively ZERO. ((in fact, I'm thankful every day that I *didn't* buy an overvalued house within the previous five years with some crushing mortgage)). BUT, it certainly wiped out a good deal of my grandparents' and parents' money. And it did for Jon Stewart's mom, apparently, and this got him good and mad.
The Stewart-Kramer interview, the full one that i posted below off the NPR site, is pretty amazing..I took time to re-listen and to type a transcript of my own choice lines.
Jon: “It’s the gap between what CNBC advertises itself, and what it is.”
::rolls advertisement for ‘Mad Money’ that says ‘it’s got your back!’
…
::rolls another clip from Jim’s ‘serious’ hedgefund
Jim: “I’ve been trying to reign in short-selling, to explain what happens..”
Jon: “It sounded like you were talking that you’ve done it.”
Jim: “Then I was inarticulate, because I did trade futures, but I will say this…I am trying to expose this stuff, and get the regulators to look at it..”
Jon: “Well, that’s interesting..roll clip!”
::clip of shady ‘serious’ advice from the hedge-fund internet blog::
Jon: “I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from this Jim Kramer.”
…
Jim: “…well, the regulators didn’t catch Madoff, that’s a shame, but…"
Jon: “When you talk about the ‘regulators’, why not the financial news networks? That’s the whole point of this. CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets. One that has been sold to us as ‘long-term.… “Put your money in 401Ks, pension funds, and just leave it there, don’t worry about it, it will be fine”…and then there is other market, this real market, that’s occurring in this backroom, this room of giant piles of money are going in and out that people are trading…and it’s transactional, it’s fast, it’s dangerous, it’s ethically dubious, and it hurts that long-term market. Speaking personally as a layman, it seems like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension and our hard-earned money. And it’s a game that you know, and that you know that it’s going on, but that you go on tv as a financial network, and you pretend it isn’t happening.”
Jim: “Sure there’s shenanighans, and we should be better at calling them out..”
…
Jon: “It is this idea that the financial news industry is not just guilty of the sin of omission, but the sin of commission…that they’re actually in bed with this idea—“
Jim: “That’s not fair, I think that we try to report the news…”
…
Jon: “This thing was ten years in the making. And it’s not going to be fixed tomorrow. And then you can have on the guys from Bear Stearns and Merrill Lynch, who leveraged 35 to 1, and then who come on, and blame mortgage-holders, that’s insanity…”
…
Jim: “Well, I always wish that we could 'swear-in' the guys who come on the show, but..”
Jon: “But you’re pretending you’re a dew-eyed innocent.”
…
Jon: “I understand that you want to make finance ‘entertaining,’ but it’s not an f-ing game. And when I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. Because what it says to me is, you all know. You all know what is going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans, to what was going on, to Bear Sterns and AIG, to this deriviative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side-bet.”
Jim: “Don’t you want guys like me, who have been in it, to to show these shenanigans, to ---“
Jon: “I want desperately for that. But that’s not what we’re getting. You knew what the banks were doing, and were touting it for months and months. The entire network was. And so now to pretend that this was some sort of crazy, once-in-a-lifetime tsunami that no one saw coming, is disingenuous at best, and criminal at worst.”
::Jim makes statements about how he’s advising the Justice Department, how he wants indictments, etc.::
Jon: “It’s very easy to get on this, after the fact. CNBC can act as….No one is asking for them to be a regulatory agency, but whose side are they on? It feels like they have to reconcile…Is their audience the Wall Street traders that are doing this for constant profit from day-to-day, or (the people)...These guys at these companies were on a Sherman’s march through their companies, financed by our pensions and 401ks, and all their incentives were for short-term profit at these companies, and they burned the f-ing house down with our money, and walked away rich as hell. And you guys *knew* that was going on.”
::APPLAUSE::
Jon Stewart mentioned that his 75 year old mother had bought into the idea of long-term investing, and that he wished there was a true news source that could have given accurate facts, instead of these swindles. And he mentions that he wishes he could go back to fart-jokes, instead of this sort of interview. My grandfather used to watch "Mad Money." Thank God he died in January, before he saw things sink further. Growing up on the streets of Newark, giving shoe shines and collecting coal from the traintracks is something he literally did, and he wanted to die a millionaire. He would have made it if not for the crisis. Am I on this "populist" Wall Street hate train? You bet.
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