You know, that would be Jim Cramer; here’s an article on him which I found very interesting. For the full article, click on the title.
Money madman who declares capitalism is crazy
Host of prime-time TV investment show says the neocon free market is to blame for the crisis.
CNBC host Jim Cramer. Photograph: Lisa Carpenter
Excerpts:
"To celebrate international Earth Week, the television empire NBC has asked America’s favourite share tipster to infuse his daily Mad Money broadcast with a green theme. As the minutes tick down to showtime in his chaotic New Jersey studio, Jim Cramer is anxious for props.
‘Do we have jungle music?’ he demands. ‘How about a pith helmet? Can you find me a pith helmet? It’s like an upside down round thing – and it’s hard!’…
"Capitalism is supposed to be regulated," he says, citing the need to protect the public against dodgier hedge funds and sub-prime mortgage brokers. "The marketplace is really stupid, rapacious at the margins. It’s a remarkably inefficient and brutal world."
Citing rocketing food prices while crops are diverted to ethanol production, he compares the US Treasury secretary, Henry Paulson, to the 19th century British prime minister Lord John Russell, whose free market policies were blamed for exacerbating the Irish potato famine in the 1840s.
Cramer reserves his greatest ire for the Fed’s Ben Bernanke, who, he maintains, was complicit in fuelling the housing boom. "Anybody who looks at his legacy will see he’s laissez-faire, laissez-faire, laissez-faire," says Cramer. "If you go back and look at his speeches in 2004, 2006, he was very much in favour of the kind of exotic home equity mortgages which are now part of a $400bn morass."
There were 14m homes sold in the US between 2005 and 2007, Cramer points out, of which a large chunk were on sub-prime mortgages. In the meantime, the Fed kept raising interest rates.
"Where was Bernanke? Did anyone sound the alarm on the rapacious strategies of the mortgage brokers? No – because they thought the market was terrific and the market could handle it," says Cramer, gathering a head of steam. "The market was so out of control that it almost destroyed capitalism as we know it but these guys thought it was just fine because the market’s never wrong.
‘It’s that hubris – that belief in the market, that Ayn Rand ‘Fountainhead’ nonsense that became our mantra in our country. It’s embarrassing!’
With hindsight, Cramer admits that his agitation can occasionally become "cartoonish", adding that he briefly feared that he had suffered some kind of aneurysm with the aggression of his outburst which has been viewed more than 2m times on YouTube.
Fiercely competitive, Cramer has since run into trouble by acknowledging his familiarity with some of the more dubious methods of hedge funds – such as shorting stocks and then spreading rumours to push down the price. This practice, known as "fomenting", is illegal – but "you do it anyway, because the securities and exchange commission doesn’t understand it" he told one interviewer. He later insisted that he was not talking from personal experience."
