“The interview on TV made it look like an unadulterated smack down on Cramer, while the unedited version was not as bad for Cramer.”

Agree – and it’s a good example of sensationalistic journalism. How ironic that, from a very general pov, this was what Stewart was reprimanding Cramer for.[/quote]

I’m going to see if using [quote] tags work here…. :)

Well said and thank you for the compliment. :)

People, including me, have admitted that the government had a role in helping create this mess. After all, who agreed to strip away the regulations? But which economic philosophy led to that?

Also, you can’t point to the symptoms of the disease and say those were the main problem instead of the “disease” that allowed banks to overleverage themselves 35 to 1.

And, again, CNBC isn’t responsible for it, but they were complicit. There’s a difference.

“The interview on TV made it look like an unadulterated smack down on Cramer, while the unedited version was not as bad for Cramer.”

Agree – and it’s a good example of sensationalistic journalism. How ironic that, from a very general pov, this was what Stewart was reprimanding Cramer for.

I think you realize that the deregulatory free market ideology is really at the root of all this. Sure, people abused the system once the system had its rules stripped away (people are greedy? really? shocker!), but those are merely symptoms of the disease. And so now you’re faced with a reality where there’s a big flaw exposed in your ideology. The intellectually honest thing to do is quit distracting us from the core problem and address it head on.

No, what I’m saying is that if people had exercised the slightest degree of personal responsibility, they could have shielded themselves from the worst of it.

There’s no rational reason that someone who is ten years or less away from retirement should have a significant portion of their retirement money in the stock market. This is an elementary concept that is easy for anyone to understand.

And yet people didn’t listen.

Why ?

Because they think that the stock market is a casino, rather than a long term investment.

Is CNBC responsible for that ? Personally, I doubt it. They put the programs on the air that people watched. They’re no more responsible for it than Entertainment Tonight is responsible for a teenage girl becoming anorexic because she wants to look like Lindsey Lohan.

And I won’t even address your comments about the free market, because I’ve done that before and because nobody here bothers to address the role that government played in creating the playing field for the current economy.

In the future, guys, I’ll make a practice of reponding only to your initial paragraphs, so you might as well keep your comments short!

I doubt the premises of the debate. I felt that Stewart was basically pounding Cramer because Cramer said something unfair about Obama. My gut instinct is that this was the real reason behind the debate, and not about the actual collapse on Wall Street. With that being said, I do think that Cramer did show a lot of humility and even contrition. It was not really Cramer vs Stewart. It was Cramer taking off his shirt turning around and letting Stewart flog him.

Now then, to Doug…

I guess what I’m not accepting is your argument that the financial planning industry or networks like CNBC bears the sole, or even a substantial amount, of the blame for the economic crisis when, in reality, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Who made this argument?

Answer: nobody.

What we are saying is that the largest financial news network should be roundly criticized for being asleep at the wheel while all this was happening, especially when you have a superstar like Jim Cramer bragging about how the markets can be easily manipulated and how the SEC is dumb. You don’t think every single person at CNBC saw that video when it aired? Of course they did. And Cramer was allowed to continue on and give stock advice like, “Don’t sell Bear Stearns!”

That’s the point Doug. EVERYBODY KNEW and they didn’t say anything. So right now when they’re saying, “Well, who could know?” most of us think they’re lying. And that means they’re complicit.

And yes, of course there’s blame to go around. Doug, who’s not agreeing with you on this? But to continue to suggest that we’re blaming this all or even substantially on CNBC is a false argument, so please stop making it.

Here’s the problem. I think you realize that the deregulatory free market ideology is really at the root of all this. Sure, people abused the system once the system had its rules stripped away (people are greedy? really? shocker!), but those are merely symptoms of the disease. And so now you’re faced with a reality where there’s a big flaw exposed in your ideology. The intellectually honest thing to do is quit distracting us from the core problem and address it head on.

Again, nobody is saying that market driven capitalism isn’t a great system. On this we agree wholeheartedly. Obviously we may disagree about which mechanisms are the most appropriate to stimulate the market during certain situations, but we don’t disagree on the core idea of capitalism.

By the way, the rock show was great.

Just in case anybody was wondering. :-)

Do you believe that people–from ditch diggers on up to our titans of finance and industry–bear some amount of personal responsibility for adhering to the law?

Agnostick
agnostick@excite.com

And for what it’s worth, Journalists and the like seem to enjoy reminding everyone of the special place that they have in our society, how they’re the front line of defense that the people have, that they’re the ones that keep the powerful honest and expose the corrupt.

A senior citizen who didn’t diversify properly made a mistake, no doubt. But making a bad decision isn’t nearly as bad as going on TV, telling people that you’re looking out for them, and then purposely giving those people bad info.

Many parts of the media, including Jim Cramer, are just as complicit in this mess as the bankers who destroyed their companies in exchange for their own short term benefit. They knew what they were doing, some of the video clips that Stewart showed is proof of that. Being dishonest is way worse than being stupid.

I guess what I’m not accepting is your argument that the financial planning industry or networks like CNBC bears the sole, or even a substantial amount, of the blame for the economic crisis when, in reality, there’s plenty of blame to go around.

Do they bear some responsibility ? Yes, but there were plenty of other bad actors out there that helped put in place the events that led us to where we are today.

You can blame Washington and certain lobbyists for taking lending standards that, in the 90s, made it hard for people with bad credit to obtain loans, and, though the means of Congress’s control over Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, forced them to lower those standards in the name of “fairness”

You can also blame Washington for spending money we don’t have, a practice when the Obama Administration is inecxpliciably continuing.

You can blame that segment of the legal profession that made an industry out of suing lenders for so-called red-lining when, in reality, what was going on is that people who couldn’t afford houses weren’t getting loans.

You can blame politicians who turned the “dream” of buying a home into some kind of right to have a home, whether you could afford it or not.

And, you can blame the public, for spending money they didn’t have, for buying houses they couldn’t afford, and for thinking that Wall Street was like a Las Vegas casino where they could get rich quick, rather than the long-term wealth builder that it was, and still is today

To place all the blame and Wall Street, while ignoring what happened on Main Street and on Pennsylvania Avenue is, quite honestly, just without merit.

I would agree with that.

But, this was not a normal world. The financial industry had developed a set of expectations–intentionally through marketing and agressive sales–that did not match reality.

The people running the system (wall street, banks) and the people watching the system (reporters, regulators) knew things were bad and that information was not shared.

Doug’s books are not investment plans, but general investing principles/philosophies. They don’t account for the malfeasance and lies perpetuated by a system that everyone who was in it knew was in trouble.

As Justin mentions, when banks and investment houses were leveraged 30-1 and securities and homes are grossly over-valued, loans are offered to people with no money down–something is wrong.

We had too much money chasing money and the result was inevitable, but very few people were sounding the alarm. You just cannot expect the average Joe to understand it when the people they are listening to refuse to admit it.

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@John Burke,

What an assinine comment. According to your theory; if I ever see you walking at the side of the road, I have the right to run you down and I shouldn’t be charged with any crime. Because theoretically, you should know that cars are larger and more powerful than a human and damm the laws put in place to protect humans from cars. In theory you should have read up on cars and knew the danger presented by them and taken all precaution to protect yourself and if that failed caveat emptor.

This is fun, I wonder if this theoretical stuff would work for other crimes like robbery, rape or murder. I mean they all have laws against them, but I’m sure John and Doug could easily explain away the criminality of it based upon the victims lack of “personal responsibility”.

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You ideologues are a joke. Your theory failed and now you’re blaming the victims.

But we all know that most people have neither the time nor the temperament — or in some cases the intelligence or necessary literacy — to make such an assessment. An older person — say, a 75 year old — may have grown a bit dim with age. Or just as likely, someone who was already 45 or 50 years old when mutual funds, IRAs and 401(k)s became easily available and began to be marketed extensively, may not have acquired the base of knowledge or sophistication to cope with anything more complicated than a bank account. We should remember that the giant mutual fund industry is basically a product of the 1980s and 1990s. Only one generation ago, no ordinary working person with a few bucks a week to invest had any means to do so except a bank account (they used to be called names like “golden passbook account” if they paid a bit more interest).

While this does not relieve anyone of the personal responsibility to behave prudently, it does spotlight the many ways in which unsuspecting people could easily be misled into believing that what they were doing WAS responsible and prudent — that is, people who trusted big brand-name institutions like Citigroup or Merrill Lynch, trusted their own own employers who set up the 401(k)s, were affected by the judgments of their co-workers and everyone around them, and relied on the generally optimistic reportage in whatever media they read or watched.

Much of this discussion is hypothetical because we don’t know the particulars of Stewart’s mother’s situation. We can assume that she was overly invested in equities for a woman of advanced age. And Doug correctly points out that mountains of financial industry and media advice has always emphasized simple “diversification of assets to suit an individual’s financial goals,” or words to that effect.

But at the same time that the mutual fund industry and the media were sounding that caution, they were also pushing stock mutual funds. A little digging would show, I think, that most mutual fund companies were saying just last year that someone approaching retirement should be cutting back equities from as much as 80% of a portfolio to 60% or 50% or 40% but rarely lower — to be decided by you, the investor, to suit your own goals. It is clear that such routine advice was crazy. Even if there had not been a market crash, someone past 60 has no business putting more than 15% into stocks — enough to provide an inflation hedge. Someone actually retired should have gone lower and by age 75 should be at zero.

Doug seems to agree with that advice. And it could have been found somewhere — but not easily for the average sap with a 401(k).

The blame for this is actually hard to fix on anyone because with millions of people getting into the market, and the financial services industry expanding enormously to serve that mass market, and the media rooting for an ever-higher Dow, and your friends and neighbors going all in, there has been a kind of mass delusion of wealth to be had. How many people sold the stock funds in their 401(k) and IRAs when the Dow passed 13,000?

People like Stewart’s mother should blame themselves first. At the same time, they are also right to blame the industry which had some responsibility to millions of people who really had no idea what they were doing and the government that did not look out for their interests well enough. These were not greedy people looking for a fast buck or a big killing. They were just saving — as once their parents saved at the corner S&L.

I went back and watched all the videos again. And from your comments, I really don’t think you paid very close attention to them or you didn’t watch them. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume the former.

First off, Stewart absolutely DOES NOT blame all of this on CNBC and to suggest as much is just factually incorrect. It simply didn’t happen. So that’s first and foremost.

Second, Stewart time and time and time again said that the day traders and the banks were using the long term investors’ money to finance their game. He made it a point to talk about how those 401(k) folks were the ones who got shafted, not anybody who was doing silly day trading or over-investing in single stocks here and there. That’s what lead to his final comment about his mom having a responsible, long term outlook and that not working out for her.

And of course there’s personal responsibility, but the fact that you don’t acknowledge this as the massive fraud that it is extremely disconcerting. Because if we lived in a world where you made the rules it sounds like corporations could get away with nearly anything since the only rule would be caveat emptor. Well, we tried that back in the day and it didn’t work here or anywhere else, and so regulatory system were formed. But then little by little, the deregulatory, free market ideology has stripped away these needed rules in favor of one that theorized that the market can regulate itself. And that’s precisely what led us to where we are now.

So the question now, why aren’t you and all the folks who fight for less regulation claiming responsibility for a reality where banks were allowed to be leveraged 35 to 1? All I’m hearing are lame defenses about personal responsibility and how grannie should have been more diversified, when, by the way, A LOT of people who were plenty diversified lost A LOT of money too.

Come on Doug, nobody I’ve seen at Donklephant is arguing that responsible market driven capitalism isn’t the way to go, but what we are saying is that the deregulatory ideology that you are pushing has been shown to be fundamentally flawed. But you don’t seem to hear any of that. All you seem to hear is “Market bad. Socialism good.” But that’s not what we’re saying AT ALL.

Last, but certainly not least, people DO take responsibility for their own lives. In fact, they do it so much more than you’d ever give them credit for. But what these otherwise responsible people don’t account for is a reality in which the entire banking system was allowed to be so utterly and fraudulently irresponsible. And right here, on these videos, you have Mr Mad Money himself trying to convince us that NOBODY saw this coming. If that’s truly the case, you really think grandma would know? Of course not.

And with that, I’m off to be somewhat irresponsible at a buddy’s rock show.

Goodnight all.

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Stewart’s point was that it was Cramer/Media’s job to call out the misconduct within the market. To report and identify the entities who were abusing the system and if after that knowledge is made public you then decide to continue to do business with those entities, then yes Doug’s point (personal responsibility) would be valid. However if the crucial link in this decision making chain (reporting) is broken, no not broken, but has turned to cheerleading then how are informed decisions supposed to be made.

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Doug M.

No one I know has any sympathy for the greedy, but what we do have is empathy for the victims who through no fault of their own, now find themselves in precarious positions. I am so glad America has moved away from your point of view.

I hate to suggest a cop-out but it could be that everyone is wrong? The individuals for being too gullible and careless with their money? The network and their personnel for treating investing like it was a spectator sport with time limits and measured quarters. I just don’t have compassion for idiots though – that’s what Darwin is for. Maybe Darwinism will see the financial networks get transformed into something else (Rukeyser on PBS never had these issues though), and of course the individuals have already been transformed into the working poor. There are two constants in the universe death, and stupidity.

I’m reminded about the story (I’m always being reminded of things) of the scorpion and the frog. I’ll spare you the whole story but the moral is “because it’s in my nature”. Why, you ask do so many people get taken advantage of by Wall Street and the financial markets…..because it’s in Wall Streets nature.

That said, I concede your points and get what you are saying, but it is a lot easier to go along with the problem being a lack of personal responsibility provided everything else was working properly.

The regulatory agencies charged with overseeing the financial system were inept or castrated, the journalistic community was largely asleep, and while I absolutely agree that a basic understanding of diversity is essential to protecting oneself against risk, when the system is rigged so that the risk is invisible or intentionally distorted, that means something–and it counts for more than personal responsibility.

People who were investing were denied the necessary information needed to make good decisions–intentionally. That is why I am sympathetic to thier plight.

I think you underestimate how much one needs to know to navigate the financial morass we find ourselves in. An investment for dummies book will only take you so far. You’re a smart guy, it shows, so you can cut through the swath of nonsense, but it is not nonsense to see how others cannot.

I barely got scratched in this nonsense, but I some people who did and even though we discussed these things, there were always 10 or 12 learned financial geniuses contradicting everything I said.

That is my ultimate point–the financial noise drowned out the common sense. Sure, you had a handful of guys warning this was all built on a house of cards, but there were more guys saying, “What, why worry?”

Without going back to Cramer, he was telling everyone Bear Stearns was solid 6 days before the collapse–and he was not the only one saying it. Smart people who knew better were pushing the lie. I wonder how many of them were dumping shares at the same time?

It’s not so much Stewart I have the problem with, but those who have taken his comedic crusade, and make no mistake this is all comedy for him, and turned it into a crusade against financial advisers or pundits in genera and CNBC specifically.

As I’ve said, there’s a certain lack of personal responsibility on the part of individual investors that contributed to this that’s being ignored.