Jim Cramer on the Colbert Report

I wrote the Colbert Report a year ago suggesting they get Barry on, so that Colbert could call him unpatriotic for his S&P “5000” call. I’m sure my email went into the bit bucket…

Well for once the clown is on the appropriate network…

I don’t give him credit for having “balls”. I give him credit for being a lunatic ego maniac who would go on any tv show at any time just to be on tv and in the spotlight.

Yeah, he really “cares” about all those people…only as long as they watch him be a moron and follow him so he keeps getting paid and his ego keeps inflating.

Nothing more than the media’s dead-cat bounce of the Creamer breakdown. There’s no evidence of balls here. In a way, I find it even more disgusting than the original video.

Some people are way too serious here.

Colbert needed a little more time to skewer some more.

It makes sense for him to go on the Colbert Report, explains himself in a low pressure situation, have a little laugh at his own expense, and he can start back on as a serious commentator next week.

If he was on any of the finance shows, he’d be screwed either way. If they don’t cover his meltdown, they would say they’re covering up his behavior. If they focus on it, it’s the media covering nonsense again.

I love the transformation mentioned by wunsacon about switching to the “People are losing their jobs…” to “7 million poor people losing their homes…” He spent like two seconds on that in his meltdown, and that was more like a statistic. Seven million people are going to lose their homes and my friends are going to lose their jobs as a result.

I wonder if he has the balls to call a real market meltdown on prime time, e.g., “…if I was still at my hedge fund….” I suspect if he was still at his hedge fund today, he’d be over 50% cash or short. Here’s a thought: Cramer calls for a crash and thereby contributes to triggering it. Individual investors get fed up, stop watching CNBC, and take up other hobbies. Mad Money is eventually canceled. Cramer, who owns no stocks and very little real estate, makes a killing buying a depressed market. Remember in the early days of the show, where he says (in the intro) “I am the market?”

Not to split hairs, but Cramer was talking about his “25 years in the business” five years ago. Isn’t the number closer to thirty now?

Perhaps, like me, he stopped counting birthdays after he hit fifty.

Dervin: Read this until you get it. Your friends SHOULD lose their jobs. In fact, every single person from the home builder to the foreign central bank fund manager should be out on the streets. Your friends wanted the transaction cash from “selling” to people who they knew going in had less than zero chance of actually surviving the loan terms. Your friends knew they had a BBB- equity product and sold it as AAA to the foreign banks.

Every professional job fires you if you funk up very important deliverables. This is no different. Welcome to the real world.

And, most importantly, quit whining – you’re only guaranteed the OPPORTUNITY to be happy in America. You’re not guaranteed happiness.

Bottom line: Your friends gambled and lost. Now they get to suffer the consequences.

**A Mea Culpa from Eclectic**

I’ve changed my whole view of Jim Cramer’s passion play from last Friday. I’ve come to realize I was wrong. I’d assumed he’d have no effect on the FOMC, but it’s crystallized in my mind now that he indeed did have an effect, and the effect was the inclusion in the FOMC statement of what I’ll term as: “The Cramer Inclusion.”

Yes, that’s right… I’m ready to enforce the objectivity on myself that I consider to be the Holy Grail of philosophical and intellectual discourse.

Winston, you and Jake were very kind to give me kudos, and I thought I’d deserved them… but if I’m the supreme objectivologist I claim to be, then I’ll have to take the stand and refute my own prior understanding.

You want to know what the Cramer Incusion was?… Okay, let’s stack the June and August statements in reverse order for you and take an [excerpt] from each that, in comparison, illustrates the tiny, every so tiny, difference that makes me wrong about what I’d thought was no difference:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/monetary/2007/20070807/default.htm

[Economic growth was moderate during the first half of the year. Financial markets have been volatile in recent weeks, credit conditions have become tighter for some households and businesses, and the housing correction is ongoing. Nevertheless, the economy seems likely to continue to expand at a moderate pace over coming quarters, supported by solid growth in employment and incomes and a robust global economy.]

http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/press/monetary/2007/20070628/default.htm

[Economic growth appears to have been moderate during the first half of this year, despite the ongoing adjustment in the housing sector. The economy seems likely to continue to expand at a moderate pace over coming quarters.]

You know what the difference is, other than the obvious lack of volume of words in June?… Well, essentially it’s the Cramer Inclusion and I’ll identify it for you:

“Financial markets have been volatile in recent weeks, credit conditions have become tighter for some households and businesses.”

That’s it my friends. It’s the words extracted from an FOMC pursuing almost the equivalent of an armed struggle, in which one of it’s members mounted a verbal attack on the assumptions gaining headway in the market that the Fed would bend its knees to what Cramer’s tirade was all about… and Cramer was right.

He wrote the song that defenders of the market have used since then to paint the picture of a Fed that will ultimately write a check for the Greenspan Put.

You need not make the faulty assumption that he doesn’t know he was right. Oh, he didn’t get everything, but he got THE THING he wanted. If you don’t think so, you’re as fooled as I was that I’d been right.

This is bigger than some academic discussion, bigger than the issue of punishment for the guilty, bigger than Bernanke’s desire to shed the helicopterizin’ image that he himself installed recklessly.

It’s here… it’s in our face… it has to be dealt with.

I’ll withdraw everything I said about Cramer in this matter, except the shrill monkey part, but that shrill monkey did something that I’ll now acknowledge. It’s very likely he top-ticked FOMC policy. They may as well have pulled up a chair and made a Cramer Seat.

Storm,

All I can say is that I expect the next cut will be between meetings… I expect the next increase will be on a scheduled meeting date.

I have no insight my friend. My opinion is like a kernel of corn in Iowa.

I am a nobody. Nobody is my name:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qOanX_TSE5U

Just a thought I’m not really tuned to all this money flow dynamics, but if it took 131B to quell the run in the EU how are we gettin off at 24B. Are they cutting us slack because their currency is new and can absorb the shock – or are we gonna have to create a whole lot more in the comming days. The general opinion is today’s fall in the EU was largely related to US subprime. I’m sure they have their own issues but thats how they’re playing it.

Cutting interest rates isn’t going to fix the underlying problems. Check out:
http://globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com/2007/08/will-rate-cuts-save-economy.html

Eclectic:

I’m writing this after Thursday’s action and news. Interestingly enough, watching the clip on Comedy Central I heard something from Cramer that before I’d ignored as hype – “It’s Armageddon.”

I started thinking about his rant – about how he was hearing how bad it was, i.e. insider information. And the more I thought the more I realized this was not a rant to the Fed – it was more like the frantic protestations of a non-english-speaking person who has witnessed a bomb planted in a building trying to warn the english speaking folks entering the building.

I still give you Kudos – I don’t think it was Cramer at all – the same fellows he knows can get information through to the Fed, as well. Cramer, IMO, was just a middleman with too much information and went into information overload blowoff.

Kind of frightening stuff, in this context.

Oh, Barney. It’s not as bad as all that. Come on, now. Aunt Bee just baked some fresh rhubarb pie. I know how you love Aunt Bee’s rhubarb pie…..

I once met one of the actors of that show while the actor was having a sigmoid proctoscopy:

http://www.pemed.com/surgery/w-a-fbes.jpg

Eclectic: “Well, hello… I’ve always wanted to meet you!”

Character (on knees, on table, scope protruding – shakes my hand): “Oh, uh, yeah… uh, yes, glad to meet you too, but uh, well… not like this of course, haha.”
—
I’m swearing this with my hand up, Winston.

Well, Eclectic, if he was smiling the whole time I’m betting it was Gomer.

Eclectic:

Maybe even better would be Dan Rowan and Dick Martin explaining CDOs to Goldie Hawn, with Arte Johnson as the German soldier sticking in his head and saying, “Very interesting. But you screwed it up!”

Balls? Barry. Dude! Jim’s been right compared to you with regard to both bullish *and* bearish calls. And he is 100% right on this call re the Fed.

Nothing here for Jimbo to be ashamed of at all!

I’m surprised at how few of my groupies have shown up (Kaos)

Meet me backstage — and wear the pink lip gloss you know I like so much!

oops… the link doesn’t work. Well, Faber’s on the Bloomberg.com video section.

One salient point:
There will be deleveraging now, so the markets will go down. (So simple it almost sounds dumb…)

The Federal Reserve just spent 62 Billion this week to keep Jim Cramer’s friends employed.

Would it have even cost a tenth of that, over the course of a year, to employee all the “forgotten men” that Cramer claims he’s concerned about? Has he only read Grapes of Wrath, or has he read any of the more recent books about Depression Era monetary policies like,
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0066211700

Will any C-level staff lose their job, have their bonus reduced, or even show the slightest amount of compassion towards the American Taxpayer that will now be paying for this multi-billion dollar bail out the rest of their working lives?

Call me skeptical. I predict the only result of this will be an extra 62 billion dollars in bonuses this year to go around Wall Street.

I subscribe to Cramer, he does a good job and makes me money, what can I say. The little guy has someone to utilize [for a minor cost..hey, no bs here- value add…] who has already made his $$ in the 80s 90s. He may have an ego, but he gives the lil guy perspective on the market they otherwise would not have. Kudos to Jim as always- calling it out and entertaining us.

sorry, I meant evid dad has it right too, not bergsten