RealGM

http://blog.indecisionforever.com/2009/ ... interview/

Completely off-topic. Did anyone see this? With my dad's background and my own business experience I was very interested by this debate. (*link above) Stewart is completely serious and pissed. WOW. I have watched it four times now.

"I gotta tell you, I know you want to make finance entertaining...but it is not a f*cking game,"

I'm a giant Jon Stweart fan. I watch the Daily Show most nights, and I catch the episodes I miss online later. I'm actually a little bit dumbfounded that this is getting so much play. This is the same message that he's been harping for two+ years, and it's only now that it's getting national attention?

Stewart, with the exception of Oprah, is the most influential person in televised media. For example, appearing on the Daily Show does more to make a book rise on Amazon.com's best seller list than any other program (besides Oprah). He also more or less single handedly ruined Tucker Carlson's career. Some folks like Brian Williams have a much larger audiance, but Stewart has much more licence to say what he really beleives and isn't forced to put up even an air of impartiality, and that's what makes him so refreshing.

Anyone who doesn't watch the Daily Show daily is doing themselves a disservice imo. I used to put CNN on in the morning in my apartment but it has deteriorated into unwatchable crap. The Daily Show is probably the only watchable televised source of news, though usually the first 15 minutes of NBC Nightly News isn't so bad for international stuff, and I have a soft spot for Maddow and usually flip to her when the Daily Show is a repeat.

It is getting hype because Cramer was involved and Stewart was very serious in the interview. Cramer knew the arguments (*as you said, same ones for 2 years) but could not do much about it.

I love the daily show and Stewart, but I don't watch it often enough. I watched this and was not humored at all. Not all that insightful or helpful, simply a vent session.

CNBC and in fact most of the news networks are just commentary anyway...

I actually like standup with pete dominic on Potus XM\sirius pretty good political talk, listener driven for the most part.

Meh. I watch the Daily Show all the time, but don't find this all that interesting.

It was sensational. I refuse to sleep until I catch Stewart. (11 pm west coast). This was absolute perfection. I feel bad that Craemer had to be the fall guy, because he is a good guy, but the rest of the world is on notice. John Mutha Flippin' Stewart is taking names.

I heart Jon Stewart

I've never watched (t)his show. I only remember the old Daily Show with Craig Kilborne was it?

Stewart's original jab was at Cramer pimping Bear Stearns Stock in February before it was the first institution to be bailed out in August.
The question is, why did stewart go after cramer now and not in August?
Answer: because after the dow hit a 12 year low last week cramer said on his show that Obama was the worst president in terms of stock market performance in history (including even hoover, which is completely factual) and that his policies were scaring investors away.

Jon Stewart is a huge Obama backer and completely left-wing on almost every single issue. Some of you might consider him "mainstream" just because every news show not aired on ABC or the Fox network is owned and operated as a subsidiary of Viacom (CBS, UPN, MTV, VH1, CMT, NIK, Comedy Central), NBC (MSNBC, CNBC, USA) or Ted Turner/Time Warner (CNN networks, TBS, TNT, Cartoon Network, AOL), 3 of the most left wing media organizations in existence. Watch any news show on any of those networks and you will get the same "tilt". They will throw in the "token" conservative (like lou dobbs) just like fox keeps alan colmes around to beat up.

Cramer probably got what he deserved, but anyone who bought stock after listening to Cramer probably also deserved to lose his money.

The reason Stewart has license to say what he wants is that his bosses completely agree with his point of view, he is there to be their mouthpiece. The same goes for the colbert report, which is subversive in the way he plays the very character he is assassinating (but he is damn funny with alot of his non-political stuff). That's the problem with TV media, everything is owned by Disney, Fox, Viacom, Time Warner, or NBC (which is owned by GE, which has sunk huge cash into "green" investments and is on the verge of bankruptcy).

The reason this was surprising is because it was one left-wing mouthpiece attacking another. Cramer makes thousands of stock predictions. He also told everyone to sell everything back in October before the markets started crashing. Stewart was cherry-picking his battle and Cramer did an extremely poor job defending himself. He should have come back with "I know you want to make politics entertaining, but it is not a f-ing game." It's much easier to come up with a snide comment to a sound-byte than to actually come up with your own ideas on how to run things, but then the average american's attention span has shrunk down to a 15-second commercial.

If you watch the "liberal" networks you aren't going to get any actual data or information about what has caused the financial crisis or what is coming, because they are embarrassed to death about what the numbers say. If you watch Fox they gloss over the republican blame and get bogged down in moral issues. You won't hear on CNN or MSNBC how the stimulus cost each and every american $4000 when the interest is accounted for, how there wasn't a single dime in the stimulus for small business. You won't hear how Obama's home mortgage rescue plan pays the interest on your neighbor's loan with your own tax dollars. How his proposed capital gains increase of nearly double is what has caused the huge stock market sell-off. How the Premier of China doesn't think our debt is a good investment anymore. That his carbon cap will cost the average family $1300 and just push off the pollution (along with our remaining manufacturing jobs) to undeveloped and unregulated countries in the far east and south america.
How borrowing all this money reduces the value of your wage and the money in your pocket, and that if we come out of this it will lead to extreme inflation. That Jimmy Carter tried these class-warfare wealth re-distribution tax policies in the late 70's and it led to double digit unemployment and interest rates and began the exodus of manufacturing jobs from this country. How 1% of people in this country pay 41% of the taxes and 40% of the population pay ZERO. That 350 economists (including 3 nobel proze winners) signed a petition saying the stimulus bill was a bad idea.

Only through watching some very smart economists talking on C-Span and some guests on Fox News shows and doing some research have I been able to piece together what caused the Housing Crisis that led to the bank failures and what has caused the stock market crash.

1. 1938 - Fannie Mae is created. It is a government Institution which buys loans from Banks.
It is effectively an Insurance institution in which bad loans can be sold to the government as long as the loan terms meet a certain set of standards (applicant credit rating, down payment, interest rate, home value). Loans meeting these standards are considered Prime Loans. Those which do not are considered Sub-Prime.
2. 1968 - Fannie Mae is sold off into a private company (but with implicit government backing).
3. 1970 - Freddie Mac is created as a brother company to Fannie Mae, doing basically the same thing.
3b. 1977 Jimmy Carter passes the Community Re-Investment Act (CRA), which gave people the right to sue banks for not giving them loans, giving groups like ACORN the power to hold banks hostage.
4. 1991 - Regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac is moved to the department of Housing and Urban Development, which effectively puts it under the oversight of the President and the finance committees of the house and senate.
5. 1995 - Under Bill Clinton the Government begins encouraging them to buy sub-prime loans by giving Fannie and Freddie affordable housing credits, a policy change which is at the root of this crisis.
6. 1998 - Clinton and a Republican congress pass a law which breaks the long-held legal separation between commercial and investment banking, which allows Wall Street to start doing all kinds of horrible and risky things with mortgage-backed securities (and the main reason we couldn't just buy back all those bad assets when this all hit the fan in october).

This causes a housing bubble because:
a.) Mortgage-Backed Securities become an extremely hot commodity for investors because of the implicit government backing, and their values are driven way up.
b.) Their overstated values and the government's sub-prime incentives allow banks to leverage their mortgage-backed securities to make more loans than they can actually afford, many of which are bad risks.
c.) Easy Credit for Sub-prime borrowers creates a flood of home-buyers, which creates an overdemand for homes, driving prices way up.
d.) Quickly Rising Prices creates instant equity which allows people to keep re-financing, pushing the natural market correction off and prolonging the bubble.

So this, in a nutshell, is what banks are thinking post-95:
This person can't afford this loan, but if I don't give it to him I'll get sued. So I'll give him the loan and sell it off to freddie mac or fannie mae (backed by the taxpayer) right away and collect all the fees.

1998-2008
Contrary to popular belief, the regulation of Freddie and Fannie (and by proxy the entire banking industry) remained pretty much unchanged from Clinton in 1998 throughout Bush's term until 2008. There was an attempt by Bush in 2003 to institute more regulation, and in 2005 an attempt led by Chuck Hagel and John McCain (and 23 republican colleagues (he referred to this in the debates)) in the Senate. However Freddie and Fannie then put on an expensive and extensive lobbying campaign, and gained enough supporters from both sides of the aisle to keep the bill bottled up in committee, where it eventually died. Many of these lawmakers either didn't understand the concepts, didn't have the foresight, or didn't want to mess with what was at the time a healthy economy.

When the Democrats took over congress in January 2007, Barney Frank in the house and Chris Dodd in the Senate took over chairmanship of the committees that oversee Freddie and Fannie. They used their positions to push for them to buy up more and more subprime loans, which quickly exacerbated the problem, caused home prices to quickly spike, and then subsequently crash.

September 2008 - Freddie and Fannie are bailed out and effectively bought by the government.

Throughout all of this Alan Greenspan, chairman of the federal reserve, pushed off the natural market correction many times by cutting interest rates when he should not have. If he had let them stay the same or even raised them housing prices would have dropped, and the small bump in the economy would have been much better than the current free-fall.

4 key points:
1. The Republicans held off on regulation because of their natural free-market principles, but when the signs pointed to trouble in 2005 they failed to act. They also failed to stop the government-backing of sub-prime loans when Clinton pushed it through.

2. The Democrats desire to help the poor led them to ease the regulation of freddie and fannie and make them give out sub-prime loans. However they failed to see the flaw in this, mainly that doing this would drastically drive up home prices and make it EVEN HARDER for poor people to buy homes.

3. Banks had to get very creative in order to make it feasible to finance overpriced homes for people with low incomes and bad credit, which led to Adjustable Rate Mortgages, Interest-only, and other very risky loans being given out and sold off as securities. This is labeled as "predatory lending", even though the CRA allowed groups like ACORN to effectively back them into a corner.

4. Opportunities for Investment, be them Home Loans, Small Business Loans, Or stock in Companies, are only possible because wealthy people have a lot of money in the bank or stock in a company. When you take away more and more of that wealth through taxes, you are correspondingly reducing opportunity, whether it be to buy a home or find a job. There is a certain threshold that just can't be passed without the economy effectively "throwing up", and the government reverting to socialism to try to "fix" what it broke. The housing problem is a small one compared to what will happen if the tax policies in Obama's proposed budget come to fruition.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freddie_Mac

younggunsmn wrote:Stewart's original jab was at Cramer pimping Bear Stearns Stock in February before it was the first institution to be bailed out in August.
The question is, why did stewart go after cramer now and not in August?
Answer: because after the dow hit a 12 year low last week cramer said on his show that Obama was the worst president in terms of stock market performance in history (including even hoover, which is completely factual) and that his policies were scaring investors away.

That's actually not at all why and how it started.

This is (From Wikipedia):

On March 4 The Daily Show aired an eight-minute clip lampooning CNBC at the beginning of a segment. The comedy news show featured several clips of pundits, focusing particularly on Santelli's appearance on the floor of the Chicago exchange, and adding predictions or reports by CNBC reporters which The Daily Show argued were overly optimistic or too strongly slanted in favor of the companies being discussed. In one clip, a CNBC host reported Merrill Lynch said it would not need capital, which The Daily Show followed with a list of the bailout money, numbering in the billions, that the financial services firm has required since September. On-air editor Charles Gasparino was shown saying in December 2007 how American International Group's subprime losses were "very manageable," and then showing that it received bailout money. Commentator Larry Kudlow was shown saying in April 2008 that "the worst of this subprime business is over.”

In another clip, Jim Cramer is shown allegedly affirming "Your money is safe in Bear Sterns", followed by a Daily Show statement that the global investment bank went under six days later. "If I’d only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today," Stewart said during the bit, "provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars."

Cramer defended himself in a column published the following Monday, claiming the clip was taken out of context.[3] Cramer said he wasn't talking about buying Bear Sterns stock, but simply reassuring a viewer that his liquidity held in Bear Sterns was safe. He also said that he had told his viewers to sell all their stocks in October 2008.

The rest is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Cramer ... on_Stewart

He took footage from LAST YEAR and dredged it up to make cramer look bad. They of course did not show any of Cramer's anti-Obama footage from earlier that week, which is what drew Stewart's ire in the first place.

From the same Wiki:
On Monday, March 9, 2009, during a segment of Mad Money,[4] Jim Cramer admitted, "OK, I'm a tempting target. Plenty of people come in and give their criticism on this show. But we're dealing with serious issues here; we need solutions, which I offer almost every night. I don't want ad hominem attacks. Take [The New York Times columnist] Frank Rich and Jon Stewart; I criticize Obama, so both of them seize on the urban legend that I recommended Bear Stearns the week before it collapsed, when I simply told an emailer that the deposit in his account at Bear Stearns was safe. 'Your money is safe in Bear Stearns,'"[5] Cramer repeated, referring to his own quote during a March 11, 2008 segment of Mad Money.



CNBC is the financial flagship of the most liberal TV network in the US, and comedy central is owned by their rival, viacom. Maybe this is just liberal political cannibalism, which makes it even funnier.

I liked the Kilborn Daily Show, and orignially thought Jon Stewart was even better. However, like many comedians, they start feeling they have some sort of significance that their education and background does not merit. I think this came to a head for Stewart a few years ago, when the comedian was on CNN(?) telling Tucker Carlton (Carlson? .. that guy with the bowtie) what his responsibilities were with the news.

Whether Jon Stewart was right, or wrong, where does this self-importance come from? Is Jerry Seinfeld going to get seriously, and tell the Fed how they are screwing up interest rates? Jay Leno tells the Pope about catholicism. Dan Barreiro telling us .. oh wait ..

The problem with the Daily Show isn't that its not funny. The problem is that its a huge distortion of the news, and viewers don't realize that their attitudes are being shaped by it. They feel educated in a "hip" way, but there's no reliability in a 20 second comedy bit. Unfortunately, many people now get their news from Stewart, or SNL, or late night talk show monologues, and forget that their goal isn't to inform you, but to amuse you. The clowns are telling people what to think, and its working.

The Colbert Report points out what's wrong with Jon Stewart. Colbert is obviously doing a bit, to try to get people to laugh. He does it well.

My guess is that Jon Stewart has listened to 20-somethings praising him for bringing him the news, and has forgotten when he gets off stage that he's still wearing clown shoes.

younggunsmn,

Excellent summary and quite perceptive. However, you need to go back a little further in time to get to the true source of the problem, which is the Federal Reserve. This was an institution installed in 1913 via the Federal Reserve Act to transfer responsibility of money creation from the government to a private enterprise. The Federal Reserve creates fiat money (nothing to back it) out of thin air, inflates the money supply thereby, and leads to booms and busts, which ultimately results in a transfer of true wealth from the people of this nation.

The Federal Reserve attempts to set interest rates without having a clue at what they should be and artificially suppresses them at the exact time they should be sky high. This leads to extreme malinvestment, manias, and spectacular busts as we are now witnessing. As with most things in our world, the truth is the precise opposite of what is bandied about in the disinfomation of the MSM. Thus, rather than the function of a free market (which would have set correct interest rates and prevented malinvestment and fraud), it was regulation that caused this mess (setting of super low interest rates, encouraging sales of homes to those who couldn't possibly afford them, giving people the false belief that they had a close eye on the market such that personal due diligence wasn't required (see Bernie Madoff), etc.).

As for Stewart, you are correct that he is a far left wing true believer that is presented as some sort of objective funny guy. I watched him years ago before he adopted his current repugnant leftism, but had to stop when everything became so obviously biased. He has had Ron Paul on from time to time, which I will watch on YouTube, but it is clear that he doesn't understand or doesn't want to understand due to his left wing bias.

shrink wrote:
Whether Jon Stewart was right, or wrong, where does this self-importance come from? Is Jerry Seinfeld going to get seriously, and tell the Fed how they are screwing up interest rates? Jay Leno tells the Pope about catholicism. Dan Barreiro telling us .. oh wait ..

The problem with the Daily Show isn't that its not funny. The problem is that its a huge distortion of the news, and viewers don't realize that their attitudes are being shaped by it. They feel educated in a "hip" way, but there's no reliability in a 20 second comedy bit. Unfortunately, many people now get their news from Stewart, or SNL, or late night talk show monologues, and forget that their goal isn't to inform you, but to amuse you. The clowns are telling people what to think, and its working.

start by saying I'm no Jon Stewart guy, I never watch the show, but he can't have an opinion unless he has appropriate post-graduate work? Bottom line for me is regardless of his methods, I see a guy who at heart is fighting against greed, corruption, and violence and that's never the kind of person I find hard to agree with.

shrink wrote:They feel educated in a "hip" way, but there's no reliability in a 20 second comedy bit. Unfortunately, many people now get their news from Stewart, or SNL, or late night talk show monologues, and forget that their goal isn't to inform you, but to amuse you. The clowns are telling people what to think, and its working.

Kinda one sided Shrink. Do you really think that ppl getting their "news" from Stewart is any worse than one of the right\left wing mouthpieces? Hannity\Rush\blablabla\whoever. None of these are "news". It is all commentary. I know from your previous posts you lean to the right, but do you actually think the different "news" BS commentary on FOX or CNBC or w\e is any more valid than Stewart?

I'm amused by much of the right wing talk these days. If you need to make a huge deal about signing\not signing a bill in public then what can you really offer?!? Seriously the most mundane BS ever. Most of it is completely absurd and considering they never lived up to their promises of smaller gov. for the last few years I can't seem to take any of them very seriously. A few rep. seem to be getting behind natonal sales tax (fairtax.org), even my local representative John Kline. So I'm interested in seeing if they can get a real vision for the party.

I'd be overjoyed with a national sales tax to reform and simplify the tax code and while this is being implemented have a pseudo-"tax holiday"" for a stimulus. No income tax or sales tax for 6 months. Implement 1/2 the national sales tax for 3 months. Implement the rest of the tax thereafter.

As for some of the other issues that have been in the news.

I'm all for education reform as nochild left behind may be the most moronic undertaking ever. Obama seems to have a good handle on these issues.

Health care reform needs to happen too. Including legal ramifications and the cost of malpractice. To complex of an issue to go into, but meh.

Here is a great article summarizing the Federal Reserve:

http://www.financialsense.com/editorials/quinn/2009/0311.html

Wonder why Stewart never tackles this subject...

bruceallen61 wrote:

shrink wrote:They feel educated in a "hip" way, but there's no reliability in a 20 second comedy bit. Unfortunately, many people now get their news from Stewart, or SNL, or late night talk show monologues, and forget that their goal isn't to inform you, but to amuse you. The clowns are telling people what to think, and its working.

Kinda one sided Shrink. Do you really think that ppl getting their "news" from Stewart is any worse than one of the right\left wing mouthpieces? Hannity\Rush\blablabla\whoever. None of these are "news". It is all commentary. I know from your previous posts you lean to the right, but do you actually think the different "news" BS commentary on FOX or CNBC or w\e is any more valid than Stewart?

I'm with you on the the fact that there are agendas behind the major news sources. ABC hasn't even been subtle. I used to watch a show called "This Week with David Brinkley," where Brinkley was a longtime respected newsman, who, at least to me, didn't seem to feel it was proper for newspeople to inject their own political opinions in the stories. He was suceeded by Sam Donaldson, who is obviously liberally biased, but also a newsman who puts the news first. He was followed by George Stephanopolous, who was famous as Bill Clinton's spokesperson! I used to watch the show to hear the different sides of the issues, but unless its changed recently, opposing views get hardly any airtime.

However, I still make a distinction between Jon Stewart and these guys. Stewart has no reason or responsibility to fact check. So what if he's wrong, if he made you laugh? He can just say "Its a comedy show!"" Worse, many (not all) of the viewers of Stewart don't get their news from multiple sources. I believe I read a survey where over half of Americans these days don't watch or read the news, and get it mostly from late night tv monologues. This is not a good thing, because people don't know (or necessarily "care") when they are being deceived.

Devilz, as for having an opinion, there's certainly nothing wrong with that. However, consider the size of Stewart's ego here. He's a comedian who does a fake news show, and he believes he has the perspective to go on that other person's real national news show, and tell him what intrinsic problems he has, and how they are hurting America?

Popularity does not equal knowledge or experience, and just because someone has an opinion, doesn't mean they have carte blanche to turn their appearance (where they were paid to come on and be a clown), into an attack on the fundamentals of the news industry. Tom Cruise may have opinions on post-partum depression, but that doesn't mean he should be turning his interview into a soapbox.

shrink wrote:Devilz, as for having an opinion, there's certainly nothing wrong with that. However, consider the size of Stewart's ego here. He's a comedian who does a fake news show, and he believes he has the perspective to go on that other person's real national news show, and tell him what intrinsic problems he has, and how they are hurting America?

The size of his ego? Stewart is constantly saying that he is a layman, and speaking from the layman's perspective. He's not the one decimating financial advice that should be described as somewhere between 'criminally negligent' and 'willfully malicious', that would be CNBC. Consider the size of THEIR egos. And of yours, for presuming that just because Jon Stewart works in comedy and doesn't have a PhD that he can't have an informed opinion. Informed is the key word their; Stewart has done his research, which you would know if you watched the piece or the show on a regular basis. Tom Cruise is a nutcase.

shrink wrote: I used to watch a show called "This Week with David Brinkley,"

Just how old are you? I didn't realize your uberconservative bent was nostalgia for the Eisenhower years.

There is no such thing as unbiased news. Newsmen trying to be "unbiased" is how we invent travesties like the "global warming debate" when there is no debate among those who are informed and educated about the subject. Just because it's possible to have a dissenting view on something doesn't make that view warrented or worthy of media converage.