Mad Money (Stewart/Cramer/Medrawt Part I)
This is going to be long.
I'm sure the people who read this blog are aware of Jon Stewart's attack on CNBC, and how it came to a climax on Thursday when Jim Cramer (unlike Rick Santelli, who originally provoked Stewart's comic ire and then reneged on his acceptance of an invite to appear) had the gonadal fortitude to actually show up and take his lumps. I'd been warned by various of the blog outlets I frequent that the video was pretty awkward and uncomfortable (when I watch The Daily Show I do so online a day or two after the airing), since Cramer basically goes out and gets embarrassed, so I was worried that I'd have difficulty watching given my inherent discomfort with watching other peoples' embarrassment. Not so - I found it gripping and not uncomfortable (from the viewer's perspective, at least), though definitely at times awkward. The whole interview was too long to run on-air, but Comedy Central provides the unedited (fucks and bullshits and all!) thing here (first part of three).
What does come off as maybe painfully awkward to people are the moments when Cramer finds himself strung up by the video clips Stewart airs. (The clips were clearly never imagined by Cramer to become publicly available; I don't know their provenance, so I'm not sure whether or not they're the same clips mentioned in this very long and only slightly deranged article about Cramer. I had heard on prior occasions about some ostensibly private clips of Cramer speaking at a function or being interviewed in which, according to some people, he essentially gave out enough rope for the SEC to hang him if they cared to, but I can't speak to the legal issues or the details of any of these video clips.) He knows they make him look bad, he offers defenses which are upended by the next section of the video, and clearly vitally wishes that there had not been a camera running that day. I do wonder whether the deployment of these clips, which Stewart effectively used to make a number of his points, actually hampered the ability to which Cramer was able to be an open and honest interlocutor:
I don't know how much actual apologizing for error Cramer does on Mad Money, but he's obviously willing to go on The Daily Show, take his lumps, and say: "Look, I was wrong," even "Look, I failed," since that's exactly what he does in this interview, however much or little it personally rankled him to do so. What he's (understandably) not willing to do is say "Look, I was bad." Stewart uses the video to undermine the more mealy-mouthed responses Cramer provides, but they also put Cramer in a position where he can't really talk honestly about what's on screen because the optics are so horrible - he has to evade the reality of what he's on camera as having said, which also means that Cramer isn't as psychologically/rhetorically free to dissect and impeach the practices he describes in the video. If Stewart had made use of video clips involving other people articulating basically the same points (although maybe Cramer is right in one of the clips when he says that no one else would be willing to go on the record with some of the details he's providing about how fund managers can manipulate financial analysts and thereby the market), then Cramer might have felt freer to provide a "safe" explanation of what he observed and even what he did as a fund manager in the 80s and 90s, an explanation that criticized and exposed those practices without precisely setting his own self on fire. I have no inherent sympathy for Cramer, but it's a lot to expect a man to willingly self-immolate himself on national television. Also, the clips of Cramer (and only of Cramer) work against Stewart's (accurate) observation that he initially had no interest in focusing specifically on Cramer, but rather was throwing pie at CNBC as a whole. Of course, while Cramer is willing to boo Santarelli's infamous "loser" rant, there's probably a limit to how much he's willing or able to throw a coworker under the bus; my understanding is that he left the world of fund management in excellent financial circumstances and Mad Money is really a lucrative "retirement," but he probably would really really like to get his contract renewed, and there's limits to how much a personality can go after another personality on the same network.
(Although maybe not: check out this montage of Shep Smith openly shitting on Glenn Beck.)
ANYWAY
The upshot is that Cramer is willing to offer apologies for incorrectness and inadequacy both on his part and CNBC's overall, and he's willing to express a lot of anger (though it's a very sad-eyed anger) at the people who created the circumstances for this financial collapse. What he can't really do, because he lacks the awareness, capacity, inclination, or courage, is engage more substantively with Stewart's critiques of both the market and the network that purports to cover it better than anyone else. He can't or won't answer what is in many ways Stewart's most basic question: what is CNBC's audience? To whom are they responsible? Stewart raises this question on I believe two separate occasions, and both times Cramer doesn't answer. The kernel that so angered Stewart and whomever else on The Daily Show staff in Santarelli's rant against financial assistance for the average homeowner was that CNBC promotes itself as a network than can help the average viewer like me or you navigate these tricky waters of the financial markets, and dispensed a lot of bullshit advice while telling us to trust them because they were the experts, when in fact if the network's coverage served anyone in the end, it was the people who fucked us. This is par for the course with my running (if not previously voiced on this blog) fury at major media outlets for having approximately 0.5% awareness of how they are intimately and inescapably wrapped up in every story they tell by the fact of choosing to tell it, and wide-eyed speculation about what will or won't be an "important" story is insulting coming from the people who make that decision by voicing their speculations in the first place.
This is doubly ironic in the world of the financial media, because what CNBC is doing by reporting in this un-self-reflective manner on the health of the stock market and its constituent companies is (a) exactly what the political media does while also (b) acting as a force multiplier on the vicissitudes of the market. Everyone will tell you that "playing the stock market" is a form of gambling, but it's really a very special form of gambling, really meta-gambling. Allow me a tendentious and over-explained analogy:
Let's say that I want to bet on a basketball game that was played tonight, the Chicago Bulls at the Philadelphia 76ers. The most unsophisticated way to do this is to simply pick the winner - I would've picked the 76ers (and been correct in doing so). That's not how real sports gambling works, though; the people with whom you will place your bets are going to offer you a "line" - I don't know the ins and outs of how this works, but in the US at least lines are more or less standardized by Vegas. The line for tonight's game was probably something like "76ers by three" or "76ers by five", and this is called the "spread". The actual bet is that the 76ers will win the game by at least the amount specified. I would've bet on the 76ers to cover the spread in either case, and I would've won if the spread was three points but lost if the spread was five points, since the 76ers as it happens won by exactly three points.
Now, there's a bit of an art to setting the line; what Vegas wants to do is pick a line such that the amount of money bet on the 76ers to cover the spread is as close as possible to the amount of money bet on the Bulls to either win or lose by no more than x points; they take into account both what they actually think is going to happen and what they think the people who are going to bet on the game think is going to happen - if Chicago fans are known to bet vociferously on their team even when it's not very good, that'll affect the line. In practice, for at least some events up until a certain point in time (or maybe even as the event is ongoing) the line is actually mobile (again, I don't know the ins and outs of this because I don't actually gamble on sports); if heavy money is coming in betting on the 76ers to cover the spread, the sports books will continue to shift the line to make that a more and more unfavorable bet so that they can get equal money on both sides of the ledger. We're getting somewhere sort of like betting on the stock market, but not quite yet, because:
In this instance, the Vegas books actually act as an arbiter of where the line is. They respond to the activity of the people placing bets, but there is a sense in which they provide a semi-externalized authority that determines what is and is not a reasonable opinion to have about the outcome of a particular game. The stock market is only the bettors, collectively setting and resetting the prices of every stock continually throughout the trading day. Setting aside quibbles about ethics and SEC regulations, if I had enough friends and we each had $30 million of money with which to play on a given day, we could radically change the prices of stocks by coordinating our efforts, just for shits and giggles. So when you step into the stock market you're stepping into a constantly fluctuating environment the fluctuations of which are entirely determined by, well, you. My bet to buy Bear Stearns (or whatever) is not in any direct way a bet on Bear Stearns, it's a bet on whether other people are going to bet on Bear Stearns. To return to the tendentious and overextended sports analogy, betting on stocks isn't betting on a line, it's betting on what the line is going to be, placing a bet a week beforehand that at the time of tipoff, the Vegas sports books would be offering 76ers +3. It's gambling on how other people are going to gamble, except since we're all in the same pool, they're gambling on how I'm going to gamble on their gambling. It's meta-gambling.
WHICH IS WHY when CNBC opens its collective yap to talk about "what the market is going to do" they're either stupid or disingenuous if they don't think their discussion of what the market is going to do has a direct and not insignificant effect on what the market is actually going to, because the whole thing is based on what the collective perception of the collective perception is, and if you've got a major media outlet discussing what the collective perception is, that's going to be heavily factored into the actual collective perception (of the collective perception).
Or as Jon Stewart put it a few days ago, mocking pundits' use of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - the Big Mac Index of stock market assessments - as evidence of Obama's job performance:
"I know what you're thinking - isn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people's assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of thirty out of tens of thousands of possible companies?" ("No! You're wrong! It is a real time, cause and effect, precision barometer of how the president is doing.")
This post isn't done, so more will follow after I've slept the sleep of the bitter.
I'm sure the people who read this blog are aware of Jon Stewart's attack on CNBC, and how it came to a climax on Thursday when Jim Cramer (unlike Rick Santelli, who originally provoked Stewart's comic ire and then reneged on his acceptance of an invite to appear) had the gonadal fortitude to actually show up and take his lumps. I'd been warned by various of the blog outlets I frequent that the video was pretty awkward and uncomfortable (when I watch The Daily Show I do so online a day or two after the airing), since Cramer basically goes out and gets embarrassed, so I was worried that I'd have difficulty watching given my inherent discomfort with watching other peoples' embarrassment. Not so - I found it gripping and not uncomfortable (from the viewer's perspective, at least), though definitely at times awkward. The whole interview was too long to run on-air, but Comedy Central provides the unedited (fucks and bullshits and all!) thing here (first part of three).
What does come off as maybe painfully awkward to people are the moments when Cramer finds himself strung up by the video clips Stewart airs. (The clips were clearly never imagined by Cramer to become publicly available; I don't know their provenance, so I'm not sure whether or not they're the same clips mentioned in this very long and only slightly deranged article about Cramer. I had heard on prior occasions about some ostensibly private clips of Cramer speaking at a function or being interviewed in which, according to some people, he essentially gave out enough rope for the SEC to hang him if they cared to, but I can't speak to the legal issues or the details of any of these video clips.) He knows they make him look bad, he offers defenses which are upended by the next section of the video, and clearly vitally wishes that there had not been a camera running that day. I do wonder whether the deployment of these clips, which Stewart effectively used to make a number of his points, actually hampered the ability to which Cramer was able to be an open and honest interlocutor:
I don't know how much actual apologizing for error Cramer does on Mad Money, but he's obviously willing to go on The Daily Show, take his lumps, and say: "Look, I was wrong," even "Look, I failed," since that's exactly what he does in this interview, however much or little it personally rankled him to do so. What he's (understandably) not willing to do is say "Look, I was bad." Stewart uses the video to undermine the more mealy-mouthed responses Cramer provides, but they also put Cramer in a position where he can't really talk honestly about what's on screen because the optics are so horrible - he has to evade the reality of what he's on camera as having said, which also means that Cramer isn't as psychologically/rhetorically free to dissect and impeach the practices he describes in the video. If Stewart had made use of video clips involving other people articulating basically the same points (although maybe Cramer is right in one of the clips when he says that no one else would be willing to go on the record with some of the details he's providing about how fund managers can manipulate financial analysts and thereby the market), then Cramer might have felt freer to provide a "safe" explanation of what he observed and even what he did as a fund manager in the 80s and 90s, an explanation that criticized and exposed those practices without precisely setting his own self on fire. I have no inherent sympathy for Cramer, but it's a lot to expect a man to willingly self-immolate himself on national television. Also, the clips of Cramer (and only of Cramer) work against Stewart's (accurate) observation that he initially had no interest in focusing specifically on Cramer, but rather was throwing pie at CNBC as a whole. Of course, while Cramer is willing to boo Santarelli's infamous "loser" rant, there's probably a limit to how much he's willing or able to throw a coworker under the bus; my understanding is that he left the world of fund management in excellent financial circumstances and Mad Money is really a lucrative "retirement," but he probably would really really like to get his contract renewed, and there's limits to how much a personality can go after another personality on the same network.
(Although maybe not: check out this montage of Shep Smith openly shitting on Glenn Beck.)
ANYWAY
The upshot is that Cramer is willing to offer apologies for incorrectness and inadequacy both on his part and CNBC's overall, and he's willing to express a lot of anger (though it's a very sad-eyed anger) at the people who created the circumstances for this financial collapse. What he can't really do, because he lacks the awareness, capacity, inclination, or courage, is engage more substantively with Stewart's critiques of both the market and the network that purports to cover it better than anyone else. He can't or won't answer what is in many ways Stewart's most basic question: what is CNBC's audience? To whom are they responsible? Stewart raises this question on I believe two separate occasions, and both times Cramer doesn't answer. The kernel that so angered Stewart and whomever else on The Daily Show staff in Santarelli's rant against financial assistance for the average homeowner was that CNBC promotes itself as a network than can help the average viewer like me or you navigate these tricky waters of the financial markets, and dispensed a lot of bullshit advice while telling us to trust them because they were the experts, when in fact if the network's coverage served anyone in the end, it was the people who fucked us. This is par for the course with my running (if not previously voiced on this blog) fury at major media outlets for having approximately 0.5% awareness of how they are intimately and inescapably wrapped up in every story they tell by the fact of choosing to tell it, and wide-eyed speculation about what will or won't be an "important" story is insulting coming from the people who make that decision by voicing their speculations in the first place.
This is doubly ironic in the world of the financial media, because what CNBC is doing by reporting in this un-self-reflective manner on the health of the stock market and its constituent companies is (a) exactly what the political media does while also (b) acting as a force multiplier on the vicissitudes of the market. Everyone will tell you that "playing the stock market" is a form of gambling, but it's really a very special form of gambling, really meta-gambling. Allow me a tendentious and over-explained analogy:
Let's say that I want to bet on a basketball game that was played tonight, the Chicago Bulls at the Philadelphia 76ers. The most unsophisticated way to do this is to simply pick the winner - I would've picked the 76ers (and been correct in doing so). That's not how real sports gambling works, though; the people with whom you will place your bets are going to offer you a "line" - I don't know the ins and outs of how this works, but in the US at least lines are more or less standardized by Vegas. The line for tonight's game was probably something like "76ers by three" or "76ers by five", and this is called the "spread". The actual bet is that the 76ers will win the game by at least the amount specified. I would've bet on the 76ers to cover the spread in either case, and I would've won if the spread was three points but lost if the spread was five points, since the 76ers as it happens won by exactly three points.
Now, there's a bit of an art to setting the line; what Vegas wants to do is pick a line such that the amount of money bet on the 76ers to cover the spread is as close as possible to the amount of money bet on the Bulls to either win or lose by no more than x points; they take into account both what they actually think is going to happen and what they think the people who are going to bet on the game think is going to happen - if Chicago fans are known to bet vociferously on their team even when it's not very good, that'll affect the line. In practice, for at least some events up until a certain point in time (or maybe even as the event is ongoing) the line is actually mobile (again, I don't know the ins and outs of this because I don't actually gamble on sports); if heavy money is coming in betting on the 76ers to cover the spread, the sports books will continue to shift the line to make that a more and more unfavorable bet so that they can get equal money on both sides of the ledger. We're getting somewhere sort of like betting on the stock market, but not quite yet, because:
In this instance, the Vegas books actually act as an arbiter of where the line is. They respond to the activity of the people placing bets, but there is a sense in which they provide a semi-externalized authority that determines what is and is not a reasonable opinion to have about the outcome of a particular game. The stock market is only the bettors, collectively setting and resetting the prices of every stock continually throughout the trading day. Setting aside quibbles about ethics and SEC regulations, if I had enough friends and we each had $30 million of money with which to play on a given day, we could radically change the prices of stocks by coordinating our efforts, just for shits and giggles. So when you step into the stock market you're stepping into a constantly fluctuating environment the fluctuations of which are entirely determined by, well, you. My bet to buy Bear Stearns (or whatever) is not in any direct way a bet on Bear Stearns, it's a bet on whether other people are going to bet on Bear Stearns. To return to the tendentious and overextended sports analogy, betting on stocks isn't betting on a line, it's betting on what the line is going to be, placing a bet a week beforehand that at the time of tipoff, the Vegas sports books would be offering 76ers +3. It's gambling on how other people are going to gamble, except since we're all in the same pool, they're gambling on how I'm going to gamble on their gambling. It's meta-gambling.
WHICH IS WHY when CNBC opens its collective yap to talk about "what the market is going to do" they're either stupid or disingenuous if they don't think their discussion of what the market is going to do has a direct and not insignificant effect on what the market is actually going to, because the whole thing is based on what the collective perception of the collective perception is, and if you've got a major media outlet discussing what the collective perception is, that's going to be heavily factored into the actual collective perception (of the collective perception).
Or as Jon Stewart put it a few days ago, mocking pundits' use of the Dow Jones Industrial Average - the Big Mac Index of stock market assessments - as evidence of Obama's job performance:
"I know what you're thinking - isn't the Dow Jones Industrial Average just a short-twitch numerical representation of a bunch of guesses about other people's assumptions about the financial well-being of an arbitrarily chosen group of thirty out of tens of thousands of possible companies?" ("No! You're wrong! It is a real time, cause and effect, precision barometer of how the president is doing.")
This post isn't done, so more will follow after I've slept the sleep of the bitter.
Labels: TV, Vaguely Political
posted by medrawt at
00:12
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