The discreet charm of Jim Cramer:
“Jim Cramer has a fistful of Harvard degrees, eight figures in the bank and an I.Q. north of 150”.
Sometimes when I read the NYT magazine, I can feel our civilization collapsing. At some level, that is probably a mark of quality journalism, given the pro-apocalypse bias of reality.
Update. I broke down and read the whole article. Hurt fee fees on an epic scale.
“As soon as he started, I realized Stewart was on a mission to make me look like a clown. I didn’t defend myself because I wasn’t prepared. What was I supposed to do, talk about how often I had been right? Praise myself? Get mad? I was mad, but I didn’t want to give the audience any blood. The national media said I got crushed, which I did, and made me into a buffoon.”
[….]After the interview, people like that, total strangers, would come up to me and say, ‘Jim, I’m sorry.’ That made me feel horrible, people feeling sorry for me. For six months it was on my mind all the time. I hurt so bad. But I don’t really think about it now.”
MikeJ
Why are comments closed on this post?
Doug Harlan J
@MikeJ:
Ha!
MikeJ
Does the NYT have two different actresses playing Jim Cramer?
Ooops, sorry, mixed up my Buñuel. I am a fan of both flicks tho.
demz taters
That doesn’t mean he’s not a fucking loathsome human being.
sb
This does not speak well of Harvard.
Comrade Mary
The words “fist” and “Jim Cramer” should be combined into a sentence in only one way. OK, maybe two, if you’re into that kind of thing.
urizon
Atlas whined.
Doug Harlan J
@demz taters:
No, it probably means he is one.
Bob Loblaw
Can’t you be emo about central African genocides or melting arctic ice caps or Mexican drug cartels, instead of puff pieces in the New York Times? If only for novelty’s sake?
Also, too, Dow 13,000 here we come, baby! Booyah, you resentful parasite.
catperson
Thanks for reading that so I don’t have to. “Jon Stewart showed the world I was a buffoon by showing video of me screaming lies on TV! It’s all his fault. Bwaaaaaaa!”
demz taters
@Doug Harlan J: So Krugman is the exception.
jl
No, this DougJ is wrong. DougJ needs to review the VSP Village code.
This is a subtle slam at Cramer for being a braggert and a fraud, since it says “he claims’. The Algorification of Cramer is upon us, mark my words.
If it meant to flatter with their notion of reporting a fact, that article would have said “Some say”. To transmit an obvious fact it would have said “Many say”.
For home work, DougJ will write out the subtext of
“Cramer challenged me to a game of table shuffleboard, two on two.”
For those who have eyes to read, that is the whole article is right there. Why read another word? Surprizing they put this bottom line so far up.
Edit: never mind. I misread the text. It just says that, no “he claims” at all. OK, it is puff piece.
I blame this on Friday the thirteenth. Should have stayed under my bed all day.
calling all toasters
All you need to know about this article and the state of the Times:
Ash Can
Hey, Cramer’s not so bad. Just do the opposite of what he says, and you’ll clean up.
BruceFromOhio
Getting paid to be a gaping rectum takes the sting out of existing as a gaping rectum.
Hunter Gathers
Jim Cramer is an overpaid circus clown.
No, wait. Strike that.
Jim Cramer is a con artist. Every night, he gives out stock ‘tips’ to morons who think that the next bet (oh, I’m sorry, the next investment) that they make will lead them to the success that Prosperity Free Market Baby Jesus wants them to have.
He has the track record of a Bloody Bill Krystol, the self-awareness of a Sean Hannity and the morals of a Karl Rove.
Anyone who gambles (sorry, invests) based on the ‘knowledge’ that he possess is too stupid to live, and would be doing the world a huge favor if they ate a bullet.
fasteddie9318
Did he seriously compare being interviewed by Jon Stewart to what I think he compared it to?
MikeJ
@fasteddie9318: Don’t we have a entry in the glossary named after a congressperson who made a similar simile? It was a big twit fest for a while.
a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q)
What I want to know is, how to market to the procrastinators in the rapture crowd? Somebody needs to score off those people, and it might as well be me.
Martin
8 figures? That’s all!? This douchebag has been manipulating my stock holdings for 10 years and all he’s gotten for it, and that’s on top of his TV and radio show is 8 fucking figures? What a fuck.
Dustin
Screw Cramer, and his feelings. I’d love to see him and all of his buddies in a prison cell. Better yet, fill the prison with guys who got locked up for crap they did after they lost their jobs, had their 401k’s vacuumed up, and their houses foreclosed. Then, to sweeten the deal, let them know who’s got their money.
What Wall Street and their enablers got away with is no less a war-crime then if they personally put a bullet in the head of every person who’s life they destroyed. The only difference, it’s a class war, and as we all know we’re not supposed to talk about it because it might hurt investors fee-fees.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Martin: Maybe he’s been taking his own advice.
Stupid f**k.
Hunter Gathers
@Martin: Well, you can’t exactly find 5 diamond whores from the Emperor’s Club in the bargain bin at your local Sam’s Club, now can you. Besides, judging by the responses given in that article, his psychiatrist bill must be massive. Most people with fee-fee’s that hurt that badly are usually placed in mental institutions.
Waratah
But, does he have common sense?
Villago Delenda Est
Um, sorry, Jim, but you do that to yourself.
Stewart was just pointing out the obvious.
Asshole.
piratedan
it’s a great gig, give financial advice, be woefully incorrect, still get paid, don’t get fired…. what’s not to love?
Steve
Way back over a decade ago I used to do securities class action work. One of the things you do to put together a case is you go back in time (wow!) and see what the analysts were saying about a company before it failed.
So you got to know the bad ones pretty quickly. Back then Cramer was a relative nobody who wrote for TheStreet.com. And I swear to God, he was wrong about literally EVERY company. Every single time you’d have a company where there was a massive fraud and the whole thing collapsed, you go back 6 months and there’s Cramer writing about how it’s a huge success story and you totally ought to buy it.
Nowadays I work on Wall Street and my colleagues are like, “What are you talking about, Cramer is really smart!” It makes me quite ill.
Short Bus Bully
@urizon:
/thread
Warren Terra
@Steve:
Dammit Steve, after reading your comment and its skewering of this fine, well educated fellow, a person like me, a total stranger, feels oddly compelled to go up to Cramer and say ‘Jim, I’m sorry.’
PS It is good to have an idea of Cramer’s IQ score. I’m always troubled when people I meet don’t inform me of their IQ scores. I suspect some of them might not even know their IQ scores.
Steeplejack
@fasteddie9318:
The hoekstroika is strong with that one.
I just finished reading it, and it is a very, very fluffy piece. Ugh.
Spencer
Jim Cramer is either a smart liar pants on fire or a dumbshit.
but a dumbshit would be right more than Jim Cramer. A Toddler who spills juice on the stock page and says “I picked these ones” would outperform Jim Cramer. no one could be wrong as often as Jim is and be dumb. it’s like when you give someone a psychic test predicting coin flips, and they are wrong about every one. that person must be psychic cause anyone guessing blindly would get a few right.
Therefore, Jim Cramer is a grifter, and anyone who takes anything he says seriously is a moron, and he should be in jail for the rest of his life cleaning toilets and getting beat with soaps in a sock in the kidneys and testicles by prison union members who lost retirement money following his advice.
Q.E.D.
freelancer
Alex Davis reads this and gets misty:
Stefan
A fistful of Harvard degrees? He has two, an A.B. and a J.D. Since when is two a “fistful”?
justawriter
Which just shows he doesn’t follow his own investment advice.
Warren Terra
@Stefan:
Well, go crumple up your college degree, and it will probably fill your fist quite on its own, especially if it was printed on fancy paper instead of xerox paper. With two degrees, he’s got not one but two fistfuls of Harvard degrees.
Nerull
@Spencer: Didn’t Cramer have a habit of betting against his own “predictions”? An idiot thinks he is right, and wouldn’t do that. A con artist knows he is wrong, and acts accordingly.
catperson
OMG it’s even worse than what DougJ quoted.
David Geffen was mean to him, people! Where’s the outrage?
Ken_L
Cramer feels like he’s been in a ‘battle of total annihilation’ because someone gave him a hard time in a TV interview?
You really can’t parody these guys. Their whiny self-regarding sense of entitlement is exceeded only by their absence of empathy for anyone else.
Lavocat
“But I don’t really think about it now.”
Wow. He thinks about it so rarely that he just had to get that all off his chest.
Denial much?
zach
What’s amazing is that his predictions regularly move the stocks he talks about the next day by a point or two. If I were a black box financial whiz kid I’d go and see if you could make money buying on the inevitable bounce after Cramer talks a stock down based on nothing. More generally, folks on Wall St tend to be quite convinced that a lot of stuff’s true that isn’t (say, the dollar’s going to collapse or China’s going to take over the world anytime soon or Jim Cramer’s word is worth anything). It’s not just a show but a genuine set of beliefs — I’m sure it influences investment decisions in a way that I ought to be able to take advantage of.
Suffern ACE
@Lavocat: He thinks about it so rarely that he’s developed a canned description of events involving the jargon of the Nazi military.
Martin
@piratedan: Incorrect? No, he does that on purpose. He runs up a stock, shorts it, drops some bullshit bad news on his show, and cleans up. He does that shit all the time.
I’d be thrilled to be wrong all the time if I was clearing 6-7 figures on a pile of put options as a result.
Fucen Pneumatic Fuck Wrench Tarmal
i stopped reading at “went on medication to help him stay calm and fight off irrationality”.
now when you’re poor, they call that psychosis.
i am not ripping him for it, i am ripping him for being full of shit about it, and the journo and the editor, for writting it as presented without quoting cramer. makes him sound like less of a bullshitter.
Jebediah
@Martin:
Isn’t that illegal?
Amanda in the South Bay
@Suffern ACE:
Well, continuing the analogy, when will someone go Operation Bagration on his ass?
Suffern ACE
@Jebediah: Taking a guess, I doubt he has a responsibility for the investments made by people watching his show.
It would be interesting to see him defend himself in court. “Have you watched my show? I run around like a raving madman shouting for hours on end. I clearly am a raving madman. I take calls from people and pretend that I’ve heard of almost every company listed on the stock exchange. Why would anyone listen to me?”
bago
Jim Cramfister?
Jebediah
@Suffern ACE:
Yeah, I forgot that it’s not like being a paid advisor and having a fiduciary responsibility to one’s clients. But I would like to see some high visibility MSM folk point it out, and ruin his lucrative con. And yeah, a court case would be even better.
Kittehs to the rescue
No one at the New York Times could be arsed to google “Kesselschlact” so they’d get the CORRECT spelling of the word?
I already knew they don’t have fact checkers (considering the total lack of factual corrections to the BS Cramer spews in this piece), but now they’ve also turned off the spellchecker?
Uloborus
@Steve:
Mmmm. Well, you work among these people and would know better than I, but he tells them that they’re awesome hard workers who are the backbone of America. Perhaps that convinces them that he’s a genius? That’s a very common phenomenon.
fuckwit
“Atlas whined.”, best comment, ever.
bob h
I’m not a mental health professional, but Cramer seems bipolar to me. On Wall St. you can parlay mental illness into big $$$.
ppcli
@Stefan: Somehow “A Fistful of Dollars” doesn’t seem like such a great movie title when you know it’s only two dollars.
PeakVT
Money is just a game to people like Cramer because they already have enough. For most people, not so much. They get hurt when the games get out of hand.
SRW1
@Stefan:
Purely a speculation on my part, but maybe Zev Chafets is a somewhat clumsy DIYer?
shortstop
I pay no attention to Jim Cramer. Never watch his show or read his thought stylings. But in every single one of the few instances in which he has been able to penetrate my consciousness, he is whining at length about/publicly picking the scab of his allegedly abusive treatment at the hands of Jon Stewart. Every single one. Dude, get some fucking dignity already.
gelfling545
@a hip hop artist from Idaho (fka Bella Q): See the book “How to Profit from the Coming Rapture”. Many, many opportunities. Also really funny.
Robert Waldmann
It is amazing how a sentence can so thoroughly demonstrate that someone just doesn’t get it “Jim Cramer has a fistful …” only makes sense if the accusation was that Cramer is dumb. Stewart’s accusation was that he is a grifter a crook. The fact that he has made a lot of money cable casting worse than worthless advice is the reason Stewart attacked him. The fact that he must know better means he’s a crook not a fool.
One doesn’t get angry at a fool.
W. Kiernan
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA
stuff like that make you want to get up and dance!
Kathy in St. Louis
All Jim Cramer’s big IQ and numerous degrees proves is that he was, most certainly, not doing his job investigating the Wall Street derivative’s market. I was just your average dumb real estate agent during the run up to the mortgage fiasco, and I couldn’t figure out how banks could make 100-110% loan to value loans to people. It seemed obvious that would only work if the housing market always had rising values and the housing bubble never burst. I didn’t understand how it all worked because economics is not my field, but Cramer was supposed to know.
So, if he got raked for his lack of substance, that’s what he deserved. When he put himself out there as the big guru, he was supposed to enlighten and inform us, the great unwashed. Hooray for Stewart. A raspberry for Cramer.
Lojasmo
To be fair (and I loathe being fair to an ass-clown douche like Kramer). I have never seen a more scathing DS interview. Stewart annihilated him (for good cause.)
Viva BrisVegas
Obviously he is too smart to take his own advice.
John Weiss
@Hunter Gathers: Right on, except for the bullet part.
Commenting at Ballon Juice since 1937
If he needs a fistful more, I’d be happy to give one right in the face. If I had eight figures in the bank, you would never hear from me again.
AAA Bonds
Out of everyone who’s not a rich criminal, what wretched being could possibly muster sympathy for Jim Cramer? He’s a loud, privileged asshole who yells at average people to buy and sell stocks for stupid reasons, while also making all of his money off those stocks.
There was a time in America when decency alone would have made people avert their eyes from him in the street, and when traders would have rather been dipped in slime than shake his hand.
The Daily Show is really boring to me. But that piece? Gold.
maus
@Spencer:
False dilemma, he’s a dumbshit liar.