Britannia Radio

Stewart’s humiliation of Cramer marks end of era

Accusations that he was a Wall St ‘shrill’ mean that Jim Cramer, the embodiment of the ‘greed is good’ era, is finished

FIRST POSTED MARCH 23, 2009

The humiliation of Jim Cramer may, finally, have driven a stake through the heart of Wall Street's era of 'irrational exuberance'. He has never been the sort of multi-million-dollar-bonus man of corporate Wall Street now at the heart of America's rage, but he has always personified the adrenalin-pumping, hyper-aggressive exuberance which has laid the money markets to waste.

With a bald head shining in testimony to his testosterone level, his sleeves rolled up to his biceps and the rat-a-tat delivery of a fairground barker, Cramer made it his business to become the public face of a Wall Street era.

He is the caricature trader of 'greed is good', the type captured by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street and, even better, by Tom Wolfe's defining New York novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Boasting that he is a "banking class hero", his schtick is to combine financial journalism with financial shenanigans. To the markets, Cramer is the one-of-us who for years has written the Wall Street column forNew York magazine, set up his own web journal, theStreet.com, and dominated the financial cable channel CNBC with his show Mad Money.

In repeated on-air attacks, Jon Stewart (right) has exposed Jim Cramer (left) as a self-interested, compromised journalist

To the punter, he is - or rather has been - the analyst/tipster who knows what he is talking about because he is the Real Thing. He claims to be worth $400 million himself, from his own trades and his own hedge fund. His books, with titles like Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer), make the bestseller lists.

However, it now turns out that what Cramer has really been is "a shrill", a man pitching a product, the cardinal sin of the supposedly objective journalist. That was the charge from Jon Stewart, the Daily Show comedian who, since Dubya Bush went to war on false pretences, has become the unlikely peoples' commissar for truth in media and politics.

In repeated on-air attacks over the last two weeks, Stewart has exposed his fellow television star as a self-interested, compromised journalist who has for years helped his Wall Street colleagues rip-off the pensions funds and savings accounts of honest