Joe Kernen: CNBC Jackass of the Day 3/10/2011

Since my cable package added Bloomberg, I have been watching CNBC much less.  However, I did catch Joe Kernen's interview with Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan today.  Naturally, when Ryan cited a recent article by Alan Greenspan, Kernen did not ask why the Republican Congressman was looking for policy guidance from the man most responsible for the financial crisis.  And of course, Kernen did not question the logic of  cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits in order to avoid cutting Social Security and Medicare benefits.

The Money Losing Wall Street Journal Op-Ed Page

My favorite financial blog is Barry Ritholtz's The Big Picture. In Art Laffer Make Up Your Own Facts Here, he eviscerates the Wall Street Journal's Op-Ed page and supply side economics shill Arthur Laffer:

In his OpEd, Mr. Laffer confuses causation with correlation, ignores market history, makes spurious argument, and simply make up crap as he goes along.

It is, to any thinking person, an embarrassment.

For example, Laffer pontificates that "It shouldn't surprise anyone that the nine states without an income tax are growing far faster and attracting more people than are the nine states with the highest income tax rates. People and businesses change the location of income based on incentives."

Ritholtz points out that "This is mostly true, but misleading."

First, 7 states have no income tax; the other two tax — New Hampshire and Tennessee — only tax dividends and interest income.

Many of the states without income taxes — think Texas, and Alaska — are blessed with natural resources. (Nevada’s blessing is Innumeracy). They don’t have income taxes because the lease licenses to the mining and oil industry throw off so much revenue, that these taxes are not needed. Confusing correlation for causation is a Freshman college error, and we should expect better from Laffer.

Note: 5 of the 9 have a corporate business tax: Alaska has a state corporate income tax, Florida has a corporate income tax (5%); New Hampshire has a Business Profits Tax (8.5%); South Dakota has a financial institutions income tax; Washington has a Business and Occupation Tax. Since these are the fastest growing states according to Laffer, is the lesson to other states to add a corporate tax?

Ritholtz also takes Laffer to task for giving tax cuts the entire credit for the economic expansion of the 1980's.

Reagan had the good fortune to take office at the tail end of a 16 year secular bear market, just as Paul Volcker fed the economy its distasteful medicine. Inflation was broken, and interest rates began their 25 year slide towards zero.

To ignore the reality of these factors, and credit tax cuts as the sole cause of the 1980s and 90s expansion is simply to discard reality because it does not fit your neat ideological universe. That is a surefire recipe for losing money as an investor . . .

Ritholtz finishes off by taking a swipe at the Wall Street Journal:

Indeed, I have railed in these pages against the ideological, fact-free OpEd in the WSJ — not because of the politics, but because they have been such consistent money losers. That would not matter so much if it were the NYT or the Podunk Press, but this is the Journal, for crying out loud, It is supposed to be the paper of record for investors.

That the money losing OpEd page of the WSJ produces its most well read articles goes a long way in explaining one thing: Why 80% of money managers underperfom every year. Filling your head with Ideology, becoming a “magical thinker,” ignoring data, making up your own facts — these are a recipe for under-performing asset managers.

If I were to create a list of questions to ask potential managers of my money, one of them would be: “Do you read the WSJ OpEds?”

If the answer were yes, I would not walk but run in the opposite direction.

For an example of Arthur Laffer's forecasting ability, watch his appearance on CNBC in August 2006 where he argues with Peter Schiff.  Schiff correctly predicted a severe recession within the next couple years because the U.S. economy didn't manufacture anything anymore, but relied instead on consumer spending that was ultimately fueled by foreign debt.  Laffer insisted that Schiff did not understand how the Chinese were actually paying us for maintaining the banking system rather than simply lending us money.  According to Laffer, Alan Greenspan's monetary policy was the product that the rest of the world was happy to pay for.

Of course you will never here CNBC's cheerleaders pointing out how badly Laffer missed the boat.  Here's Larry Kudlow kissing Laffer's ass yesterday.

CNBC Protects Jim Cramer

In the following clip, which doesn't seem to be available on CNBC's website, a guy named Sylvain Raynes had the audacity to suggest that CNBC's previous guests had been acting as PR guys for Goldman. This provoked outrage from Jim Cramer and a firm admonishment from Erin Burnett. No doubt he will never be asked again.



Unfortunately the clip doesn't show all of Cramer's comments which were critical of the suckers who bought the CDO's. Cramer referenced his days as a hedge fund manager and said the the buyers should have understood that there was someone on the other side of the trade who might not be interested in the buyer's welfare.

This is of course bullshit. As a professional trader, I understand that when I trade options or futures the guy on the other side of the trade is hoping that I will lose money on it. However, this is not the case with all investments. When I buy a stock, the guy on the other side may be completely indifferent to whether I make money on the purchase since he is simply selling the stock because he needs the money for something else. If I purchase a mortgage backed security, the guy who is ultimately on the other side is the guy who borrowed the money to buy a house and he is hoping that I will get my money back.

This case is completely different though. This is like a case where I buy shares in a mutual fund and the guy who is managing the fund, i.e., the guy to whom I am paying a fee to pick the stocks that the fund will buy, is shorting those same stocks in his personal account. Anyone who defends that kind of conduct rightly deserves to be considered a shill for Wall Street

Melissa Francis: CNBC Twit of the Day 3/16/10

I haven’t been doing my CNBC Twit of the Day lately just because it is so painful to go back and watch one of those idiots a second time just to be sure they were as big an idiot as I thought they were the first time. Today for example, Melissa Francis was not content with her usual brownnosing of the shill from the Cato Institute and went all the way to Pavlovian salivation as Mark Calabria discussed today’s Federal Reserve Board meeting.

Mark Calabria: We need to keep in mind what Milton Friedman regularly reminded us . . .

Mellissa Francis:  Yes. Always.

Mark Calabria: . . . monetary policy acts with a long and variable lag.

My God! Melissa didn’t even know what it was that the Catotonic goofball wanted us to keep in mind. But it didn’t matter. She heard the hallowed name of Friedman and she she was ready to start speaking in tongues. “Amen! Amen!” “Glory be to the Chicago School!” It’s bad enough that she cannot bring herself to ask one of these libertarians idealogues whether less government oversight is really the cure for the banking system, do we have to listen to her ecstatic utterances, too?

Record Pay for Bankers and Class Envy

According to this morning's Wall Street Journal: "Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their people about $145 billion for 2009, a record sum that indicates how compensation is climbing despite fury over Wall Street's pay culture."

The Obama administration has proposed a bank tax to recoup some of the money that the taxpayers have spent bailing out the financial system. Of course, Wall Street is outraged by this. Speaking on CNBC with Larry Kudlow this morning, portfolio manager Matt McCormick of Bahn & Gaynor said, "It's a class envy issue in my opinion."

Really Matt.  Ya' think?

Of course it's a class envy issue!!  Unemployment is at its highest level in decades.  People without jobs envy people with jobs.  People who have seen the stocks in their retirement accounts take it on the chin are envious of the people who are making more money working for the companies that manage those retirement accounts.

More importantly, isn't class envy the driving force behind capitalism?  Individuals pursuing their economic interests is wonderful as long as it puts money in the pockets of Wall Street, but if the unwashed masses should consider pursuing their interests in some other way, e.g., walking away from an underwater mortgage or imposing taxes on the wealthy, bankers suddenly become beacons of moral rectitude.

Sen. Judd Gregg: CNBC Guest Jerk of the Day 1/11/10

After the last two years, you wouldn’t think that anyone would proclaim the kind of blind faith in market forces that Judd Gregg did yesterday.

If the banks have some sort of investment from the taxpayers, then the taxpayer has a right to control and have a large say in their compensation. If the banks are not getting an investment from their taxpayer, then the banks can do whatever they want. It’s their stockholders that they have to answer to and if the stockholders are willing to pay those kind of bonuses, they must be thinking they’re getting value for than that in terms of stock appreciation or dividends.

Oh really Judd? Must they be thinking that?

So you figure that AIG’s stockholders thought that it would be a good idea to pay billions in bonuses to executives to write insurance policies on mortgage back securities without setting up any reserves. They must have thought that, right? Otherwise they never would have bought shares in the stock in the first place.

FYI Judd, that was not my thought process when I bought AIG stock for my IRA. What I thought was that given low interest rates, I had very little choice but to invest in stocks if I hoped to be able to retire. I bought AIG because the research I did indicated that it was a conservative insurance company that produced consistent earnings.

What I find so interesting is that Gregg is perfectly willing to endorse say and control over compensation where the taxpayers have invested in the banks. If there is nothing wrong with the huge portion of financial companies’ profits that goes to executive compensation rather than building shareholder equity, why shouldn’t the taxpayer happily sit still for the same shit as the poor schlub who holds the stock through a mutual fund in his IRA or 401k?

Could it be that the little guy needs the government to do something in order to level the playing field? Isn't it possible that government regulation is necessary so that publicly held companies aren’t just honey pots for corporate insiders?

Charlie Gasparino: CNBC (and WSJ) Jackass of the Day 11/6/09 (Part 2)

Charlie’s argument about the government encouraging home ownership is trickier and it requires some consideration of American political history.

It may well be that of all the rights the Founding Fathers sought to protect from government interference, property rights were foremost in their minds. It may also well be that nowhere else in the world could you have found popular support for a revolution based on property rights. In Europe, there were unpopular governments, but in there were also vast segments of the populace who owned no property and had no reasonable prospects of ever obtaining any property. As a result, you couldn’t build an army motivated primarily by the vindication of the right to property.

In America, however, things were different. Thanks to the Indians’ susceptibility to European diseases, there were vast tracts of land there for the taking. Everyone could aspire to own a piece of the land from which he could provide for himself. From this comes Thomas Jefferson’s vision of the ideal citizen as the yeoman farmer. The common man would fight for a government that protected property rights in America because the common man could carve out his own piece of property from the wilderness.

As vast as America might have seemed to the Founding Fathers, it wasn’t unlimited. As immigrants flocked here from Europe, all the good land was eventually taken. As the frontier closed and the poor man no longer had the option of packing up and making a new start out west, it became more difficult to maintain popular support for a government whose sole goal seemed to be the property interests of the wealthy.

Things came to a head in the Great Depression as the last parcels of land that had been available to homesteaders in Oklahoma turned to dust and the citizen farmers that were expected to form the backbone of the republic found themselves on the road. Under Franklin Roosevelt, the government actively intervened in an effort to provide the equality of economic opportunity that had once been available simply by virtue of unoccupied space.

The pendulum always swings though and in 1980 Ronald Reagan was elected on a promise to return America to a simpler time when government protected an individual’s property rights and otherwise stayed out of the way. Unfortunately, land was no longer just there for the taking and another method was needed to convince the common man that he shared the wealthy man’s interest in the protection of property. It is no coincidence that the massive expansion of consumer debt started in the Reagan years.

Charlie bemoans the transformation of home ownership from “something that must be earned into something close to a civil right,” an event that he seems to locate during the Clinton administration. What he misses is that the roots of the notion go right back to our founding. You cannot elevate property rights above all else in a democracy if everyone does not have some opportunity to acquire property. The only way to maintain the illusion of the conservatives’ beloved “ownership society” is easy money that makes both the easy credit with which to buy things and the asset bubbles that create the illusion of wealth.

Charlie Gasparino: CNBC (and WSJ) Jackass of the Day 11/6/09 (Part 1)

Consider the following game:

From a standard deck of fifty-two playing cards along with two jokers, I let you pick a card. If the card is a spade, heart, diamond, or club, you receive $20,000. If the card is one of the jokers, you lose $1,000,000. Would you play the game?

Unless you are a fool, you wouldn't. After drawing the entire deck, you would be out $960,000.

Now let's change the game:

You draw cards from the same deck. You still get $20,000 every time you draw a spade, heart, diamond, or club. Now, however, when you draw a joker, you lose half of what you have made up until that point and some unknown innocent party loses $1,000,000. Would you play that game?

If you had some sense of ethics, you might not, however, if you were a Wall Street trader or executive, you would play all day long.

In a Wall Street Journal Op-Ed today and frequent spots on CNBC, Charlie Gasparino claimed to have identified the cause of the financial crisis. Anyone who is familiar with those two fonts of wisdom won't be surprised to learn that it wasn't the over-compensated traders and executives on Wall Street who took irrational risks. It was...brace yourself...the government! Specifically, it was the government leading those risks takers to believe that they would get bailed out if their bets went sour and that same government encouraging undeserving peons to believe that home ownership was a right. I will only try to address Charlie's first reason for blaming the government in this post.

The problem with Gasparino's "moral hazard" thesis is that the traders and executives who worked for companies that got bailed out didn't do any better than the ones who worked for companies that didn't get bailed out. Think about it. Bear Stearns got bailed out and Lehman Brothers didn't. However, both Jimmy Cayne and Dick Fuld took a bath on their holdings in company stock as did all the traders and executives in those companies. Moreover, traders and executives in both companies lost their jobs. If the potential for a government bailout played a role in the risks they took on behalf of their companies, why didn't the bailed out executives come out way ahead?

The reason is that the risk that Wall Street traders take is driven by the nature of their compensation packages, not by the possibility of bailouts. Like players in the second game I described, Wall Street executives get paid generously if their bets work out and they have to give up part of what they made if things blow up in their faces. However, it doesn't matter to the executives and traders who takes the loss when they draw the joker. If their company is bailed out, it is the taxpayer. If it is allowed to fail, it is their company's lenders, customers, and counter-parties that take the hit. The executives and traders are indifferent between the two. They will take the risks they do as long as the losses fall somewhere else and that is a function of the manner in which they are compensated, not the extent to which the government backstops the market.

Mark Haines: CNBC Hero of the Day 8/19/09

I've got to give credit where credit is due. My nephew was right. Although I have called him a jerk in the past, Mark Haines has shown himself willing to play the crusty old curmudgeon from both sides of the aisle in the past few days in the debate over health care reform. Today he took on the Harvard Professor Martin Feldstein who wrote an op-ed in today's Wall Street Journal titled "ObamaCare Is All About Rationing." The Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers under Ronald Reagan did not get the warm embrace that members of that administration have come to expect on CNBC with Haines repeatedly pointing out "Your argument is a very easy one to make by someone who has money."

The best part was when Feldstein tried to make a boogeyman out of cost-effectiveness research.

Feldstein: What do you think the cost-effectiveness research is for?

Haines: For the government to decide what it thinks the money is best spent on.

Feldstein: That's right. That's right.

Haines: That's simply rational sir. That's simply rational to make the decision based on what history has shown is the effectiveness of a therapy.

Feldstein: Yes, but you and I may have a different tastes. On whether I want to get a different test.

Haines: But if you have the money, you will still be able to get that.

Larry Kudlow: CNBC Jerk of the Day 7/7/09

For the biggest jerk on CNBC today, I have to go with Larry Kudlow for his mindless response to the possibility that the Obama administration might consider enforcing our nation's antitrust laws for the first time in thirty years. Kudlow went on a rant in a conversation with CNBC political analyst John Harwood. "I've got to ask you: front page, Wall Street Journal, a new antitrust jihad against businesses. Look its businesses that create jobs. I assume all the smart people in the White House know that. Phone companies, drug companies, Google, airlines, multinational firms, plus a hike in the minimum wage. John, without business, you can't have a new job. Why are they waging jihads against business?"

Not surprisingly, Kudlow was speechless when Harwood calmly explained the logic behind antitrust enforcement. "I think their argument Larry is that moving on antitrust issues creates competition which in the long run will reduce costs even if its uncomfortable for those existing businesses." Co-host Melissa Francis also seemed to be amazed by Harwood's response. "John, I loved your answer on the fly there."

Later in the day, Michelle Cabruso-Cabrera was similarly taken aback when Harold Feld pointed out that fostering competition by enforcing antitrust laws might help the economy. "Christine Varney [of the Department of Justice Antitrust Division] said it best: 'antitrust is the best stimulus. If you want to see venture capitalists putting money in the market. If you want to create jobs. You've got to give new entrants a chance. For that, you need strong antitrust.'" "Wow!" responded Cabruso-Cabrera, "I'm very impressed Harold. We're going to have to have you back."

What frustrates me most about so many of the idiots on CNBC is that they don't think they need to have any command of the issues. All they figure they have to do is repeat their mantra "Government bad, business good. Government bad, business good. Government bad, business good." Given all the problems that have been created by businesses that are "too big to fail," you would think that the notion of enforcing antitrust laws would not be so astounding to the on-air personalities at the leading business network.

Dennis Kneale: CNBC's Jerk of the Day 6/30/09

The "jerk" in today's Jerk of the Day is for Dennis Kneale's knee-jerk reaction to an FDA advisory panel's recommendation to lower the maximum daily dosage of acetaminophin, the active ingredient in Tylenol, Vicadin, Percocett and a number of other medications. According to the panel, acetaminophen causes more liver damage than any other drug with as many as 20,000 accidental overdoses each year and as many as 100-200 deaths. Kneale couldn't pass up the chance to take a couple swipes at the Obama administration though:
This is an activist Obama FDA vowing that they’re going to take the lead in making the American public healthier. The side effect from too much use of Tylenol on the liver has been known for what, five or ten years? Only now it’s a new administration with a new policy and they’re going to crack down. I just think a simple warning “Hey, don’t take it so much” ought to be enough here. (Responding to the number of people who die each year) Out of how many millions who take it every year? It’s such a small number. Now you are going to have people who aren’t taking it enough and they will be in pain as a result of this decision. I just say its way interventionist and it’s an FDA commissioner who is crusading rather than regulating. And we’re going to change the rules for all of them because a hundred or two hundred die. I love the Obama era, they’re just protecting us from ourselves again and again.

That’s right! This moron actually suggested that the FDA should put a warning on a package that says “Hey, don’t take it so much” rather than recommending a specific maximum dosage.

Of all the jerks on CNBC, I least understand how Dennis Kneale still has a job. While Kudlow, Santelli and Cabruso-Cabrera are every bit as ideological, they usually have enough sense to stick to vague free market shibboleths rather than offering specific proposals that would expose their vacuity. Kneale just blurts out anything that comes into his head even if means scoffing at people dying.

It is hard for me to believe that anyone is going to see this as FDA overreaching. It’s not like changing the recommended dosage will prevent anyone from gobbling down as much Tylenol he wants. Maybe Kneale is worried that he won’t be able to get his doctor to prescribe enough Vicadin or Percocet to keep his capacity for rational thought disabled. If this qualifies as “crusading” from the Obama administration, I think we are in deep trouble.

I’m also rather puzzled that Kneale would want to make a point of the fact that the FDA did nothing about this side effect during the Bush administration. On the other hand, I suppose that Kneale figures that eight deaths from samonella is nothing compared to all the peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that get eaten.

My friend TGirsch has encouraged me to do more posts on the daily inanities on CNBC. I hope he appreciates that just the thought of how much Tylenol I am going to need to get rid of the pain in my skull that comes from listening to this jackass is causing my liver to fail.




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Michelle Cabruso-Cabrera: CNBC's Jerk of the Day 6/29/09

There is an old movie from the 1960's called Guide for the Married Man in which Robert Morse instructs Walter Matthau in the fine art of philandering through a series of vignettes with cameos by many stars of the day. In one of them, Joey Bishop is caught by his wife in bed with another woman. His wife is played by Ann Morgan Gilbert a.k.a. Millie Helper on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Bishop and the other woman quickly dress and make the bed as he ignores his wife's demands for an explanation. The choreography of the scene is perfectly executed by director Gene Kelly and in a matter of seconds, the woman is gone and Bishop is sitting innocently in a chair reading his newspaper as Gilbert stands in stunned silence trying to figure out what just happened. The moral as Morse explains to Matthau is to always deny everything.

I am put in mind of this scene almost everyday by someone on CNBC pretending that the last two years of financial turmoil never took place. Today it was Michelle Cabruso-Cabrera drawing the obvious conclusion from the Bernie Madoff scandal: get rid of the S.E.C. Naturally, the answer to crime is to get rid of the police. As she explains to former S.E.C. enforcer Thomas Gorman, "Government regulation gets in the way. It doesn't protect anybody." She prefers to put her confidence in those free market forces that didn't catch Madoff either while producing credit default swaps and toxic mortgage-backed securities.

Mark Haines: CNBC Dumbass of the Day 4/24/09

Mark Haines distinguished himself today with a level of partisan stupidity that was impressive even by CNBC standards. The subject was whether allowing banks to repay TARP money might leave them with insufficient capital to withstand continued deterioration in the economy. Bloviated Haines "I can’t help but be cynical about this, sounds to me like the government just wants to keep their hooks in them." When Steve Liesman pointed out that the administration has a lot of things it would rather be pursuing than babysitting banks, Haines answered "It certainly appears to me that the government is relishing the power it has right now."

What a dumbass! No one who voted for Obama wanted him to have to devote this much effort to keeping the banking system afloat just as no one wanted to see him having to spend this much time keeping the auto manufacturers from collapsing. No one is happy about this.

Haines demonstrated his ability to throw the last two years down the memory hole with his insistence that the banks should be able to pay back TARP funds even if it left them undercapitalized. "If Jamie Dimon or Blankfine or whomever wants to give the government its damn money back, I don't see how that's a problem. . . . It's there bank. Do you think they want to drive themselves off a cliff?"

They don't want to drive themselves off the cliff, but Wall Street bankers have demonstrated that they are perfectly willing to risk it in order to line their own pockets. In House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched Excess on Wall Street, William D. Cohan details how the executives at Bear Stearns let things spin out of control rather than raise necessary capital that might dilute their control and decrease their bonuses. Wall Street bankers will be happy to put the financial system at risk by operating with insufficient capital if it means that they can go back to looting their companies.

Larry Kudlow: CNBC Jackass of the Day 4/9/09

In response to Jim Kramer's debacle on the Daily Show, CNBC has been running a new series of ads touting its infotainers tough street cred, but it has not done a thing about the mindless cheerleading of Larry Kudlow. Watch him shout over Paul Miller of FBR Capital Markets (at the 2:20 mark) for remaining skeptical about whether the mortgage banking has turned a corner "You're missing the key point! Markets work!"

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey: CNBC Guest Jackass

Dick Armey's analysis consisted of nothing more than a bunch of laissez-faire talking points about how wonderful markets work when freed from government regulation, e.g., “let the market settle this stuff and let the people who created the problem take the consequences.”




The problem Dick is that the people who created the problem aren't taking the consequences. The guys who wrote all the credit default swaps at AIG collected their millions in salaries and bonuses. The guys who created the mortgage backed securities at Lehman and Bear Stearns have already cashed their checks.

They may be out of work for the moment, but Geithner's plan is going to create demand for people who understand how these instruments work. I have no doubt that many of these guys are going to wind up collecting huge paychecks to help clean up the mess that they got paid to make in the first place.

Michelle Cabruso-Cabrera: CNBC's Jerk of the Day 3/19/09

My nominee for jerk of the day at CNBC for Thursday is Michelle Cabruso-Cabrera for scoffing at the idea that notions of right and wrong might have some role in the discussion of what went on at AIG. Everyone on Power Lunch had agreed that scapegoating the AIG executives who got the big bonuses was a bad idea, however, Steve Liesman suggested (at the 3:50 mark) that there might be legitimate reasons to examine the situation more closely.

Liesman: There is one purpose that I think President Obama talked about—a new era of business executives having certain values that are, how do you say this, take into consideration those of society in general.
Cabruso-Cabrera: (snorts)

Liesman: You know what Michelle, you can laugh at that, but when you have a situation where these guys are happy to take as much as they want, as much as they’re given, and maybe it’s not the right thing to do, I think there is something to be said for it.

Cabruso-Cabrera: All this right and wrong, morality play, you’re going down a very dangerous path.

What about the path that we have already gone down Michelle?

The AIG Financial Products unit wrote insurance in the form of credit default swaps on $2.7 trillion dollars in bonds without establishing any reserves in case it had to make good on those contracts. Isn't this something that we can talk about in terms of right and wrong? Does the fact that they were able to get away with it absolve the executives of any responsibility?

Olberman and Maddow: Corporate Sell-Outs?

I found it very disappointing that Keith Olberman did not mention Jon Stewart's interview of Jim Cramer and that Rachel Maddow only mentioned that it had gotten a lot of press without showing any clips from it or explaining what had happened. It is very difficult to escape the conclusion that someone up the corporate ladder decided that no one on any of the NBC networks should mention the story.

On the Daily Kos, Olberman denied any such censorship and claimed that he simply did not consider it to be an important story. He pointed out that he had featured CNBC's Rick Santelli as a "Worst Person in the World," but that seems pretty thin. Santelli is a very minor CNBC contributor while Jim Cramer is one of its best known personalities with an hour-show of his own everyday. Santelli's rant did not reflect upon the the network's coverage as a whole.

For all the right wing ranting about the liberal media, the content is still controlled corporations like NBC parent GE who can nix any story that strikes too close to home

Jim Cramer on the Daily Show

As a market-maker on the trading floor of Chicago Board Options Exchange, I knew lots of people like Jim Cramer. He has the trader's mentality that the stock market is a game to be played. As long as a trader plays by the rules (which Cramer may or may not have done when he was running a hedge fund), there is nothing wrong with that. The problem comes when the people who are playing trading games pretend that they are champions of capitalism who are investing in America and creating wealth. The problem with CNBC is that it shills for the Wall Street players and helps perpetuate the deception.

Jon Stewart did a brilliant job of exposing that deception last night in his interview with Cramer on The Daily Show. Stewart usually takes it easy on his guests regardless of their political leanings. Even someone as detestable as Josh Bolton or Doug Feith need not worry about much more than a pointed question or two. However, Stewart never let Cramer off the hook, forcing him to watch video clips of a three-year old web interview in which Cramer explained many of the tricks he played as a hedge fund manager. Stewart was not having fun and neither was Cramer.

So what turned Stewart into a pit bull last night? I don't think he held any particular animosity towards Cramer who seems to be a personable rogue. I think he did it because nobody else does. There are tons of people out there who are going after the Boltons and Feiths of the world, so Stewart doesn't mind going for laughs when they come on his show. However, nobody is going after the financial pundits and Stewart knew that someone should.

It was an impressive performance. Watch Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of the unedited interview.

Charlie Gasparino: CNBC's Jackass of the Day 3/12/09

CNBC’s jackass of the day for Thursday, March 12 is on air editor Charlie Gasparino. You might think it was Jim Cramer who found that being satirically skewered by The Daily Show was a walk in the park compared to the ass-whipping he got under Jon Stewart’s questioning, but I give Cramer credit for going on the show and taking it like a man (unlike Rick Santelli). Gasparino, on the other hand, clearly displayed the partisan hackery that makes CNBC such a cesspool.

In a segment titled “Seeking Solutions,” Clinton’s Labor Secretary Robert Reich and Bush’s Labor Secretary Carlos Gutierrez are supposedly on the show to talk about creating jobs. For years Gutierrez appeared regularly on CNBC to shill for Bush’s disastrous economic stewardship and in yesterday’s appearance he mouthed trite conservative pieties about letting the private sector handle things without any challenge from the commentators. On the other hand, Dennis Kneale asked Reich a rather pointless question about whether Obama should be reaching out to Wall Street for advice on handling the economy. This was followed by Gasparino ranting about the fact that Obama wants to allow tax rates to return to the level that they were under the Clinton administration and rudely talking over Reich when he tries to address the question, even going so far as to imply that Reich is lying about the prosperity that the country enjoyed in the 1990’s.



This is not to suggest that there is anything illegitimate about questioning whether Clinton deserves as much credit for his management of the economy as his fans would give him. Nevertheless, it is incontrovertible fact that job creation in the 1990’s was superior to that under Bush. It is also incontrovertible fact that the recession that Bush inherited was relatively mild. It is inexcusable that Clinton’s Labor Secretary can’t make his case for Obama’s economic policies without being shouted down by a jackass like Gasparino.

Erin Burnett: CNBC's Twit of the Day 3/10/09

Erin Burnett gets my vote for CNBC’s biggest twit today although her twittiness was on display on NBC’s Today Show rather than her usual gig on CNBC’s Street Signs. Burnett appeared with CNBC’s Jim Cramer who was struggling to defend himself against another beat down from Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. In a column on MainStreet.com, Cramer had accused Stewart of taking his comments about Bear Stearns out of context. Cramer said that he had not been encouraging viewers to buy Bear Stearns stock one week before it collapsed as the clip played on The Daily Show implied; he had merely assured viewers with accounts at Bear Stearns that the money and securities in those accounts were safe. Stewart acknowledged the error, but the Daily Show’s researchers found that Cramer had recommended Bear Stearns stock at $69

Ever Cramer's loyal side kick, Burnett piped in with “Just to defend you Jim: Jim has to go out everyday and make these calls.”

Apparently, for Erin Burnett, the fact that Cramer gets paid to go out and shoot off his mouth about stocks everyday absolves him for any responsibility for pretending to know more than he really knows. I suppose that same logic would absolve all the mortgage brokers who sold subprime loans to unqualified home buyers. After all, they had to go out and recommend negative-amortization/interest-only/no-down-payment/teaser-rate loans to fools because that was what they were getting paid to do.

Burnett’s logic is actually quite consistent. Nobody should complain about China selling poisonous products because people are willing to pay for them. Nobody should complain about Cramer talking out of his ass because CNBC is willing to pay him to do it.