Another Daily Show bit that will stand out over time. The actual show cut this way down, but the full, unedited, 23 minutes or so, is available online. And we’re left once again asking why “real” news places don’t actually push and prod and question the assumptions everyone makes, etc. It would be nice if that happened sometime. This is played straight too. This isn’t a bunch of laughs. Both Steward and Cramer are dead serious almost the whole time. Speaking of which, I give Cramer a lot of credit for actually coming on this show and taking his spanking.
In three parts:
(via Oliver Willis and a bunch of other places)
I ocassionaly listen to Jim Cramer and if he has been making mea culpas for the last year for a lot of the calls he didn’t make.
Me being a student of financials and the markets also did not foresee a lot of the things that are happening. I foresaw a deep recession, I figured because of the slowing housing market and credit defaults, however I did not foresee the crazy financial structures that large banks and wall street firms and insurers had created. I didn’t believe that anyone would have been insane enough to build such a house of cards. I didn’t believe that people were packaging junk mortgages as AAA or that mortgage houses were so flagrant in their completely ignoring all of their responisbilties when underwriting a mortgage. Or that AIG could have written over a trillion dollars of default swaps that other banks took into their books like cash.
The biggest thing that happened in the last ten years is that finance changed a lot with the large uses of new financial instruments but the rules regulating all types of financial institutions did not keep up with the changes are were still based on how banking was 50 years ago. The fact that we had an administration averse to rule making made it that nobody cared to study what has happening and kept loosening rules like the rules that allowed the 35 to 1 leverage talked by Cramer in the segment. The problem has been because rules didn’t change you grabbed the financial statements of any of these banks or insurance companies and you couldn’t tell what they held. Nothing, they gave you no clue since they were still reporting like it was 1955.
It’s very chic to take on Jim Cramer since he is loud, but honestly, he has been browbeating himself for a longtime on the show and so should I, because we just didn’t believe that so many people could be liars and crooks.
I have some thoughts on your thoughts, but lets save it for the podcast. :-)