“CNBC Criticism and Jim Cramer Interview (March 2009)” quotes from The Daily Show

If I’d only followed CNBC’s advice, I’d have a million dollars today. Provided I’d started with a hundred million dollars.... That is amazing! I mean these CEOs saying their own businesses are doing OK! I mean, it makes sense to take these CEOs word for it. For instance, I know O.J. Simpson. He told me he didn't kill anyone and he should know, he was there!

Between the two of them, I can't decide which one I'd rather see in jail.

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 30 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! It’s been that way for years!

You don't have to make comedian sound like a venereal disease. He's a comedian. He's gonorrhea. [...] And variety show? You make me sound like some kind of buffoon, just flapping my arms to crazy sound effects. [Montage of sound effects from Mad Money plays.] Yeah! Like that guy! Whoever he is.

I don't know about the markets. That's why I don't make the claim to any authority. That's why my network doesn't have the slogan "In Stewart We Trust." They don't want people to think I'm God. Now of course, I probably wouldn't have a problem if Cramer's slogan was Cramer: He's right sometimes or He's like a dartboard that talks or You feel lucky, punk? Well, do you?

Although to be fair, cherry picking isn't quite what we do. Cherries are sweet and delicious. What we do is more turd mining. And I'll thank you to give our work the respect it deserves!

Dora: Doesn't Jim Cramer understand that it's not about individual mistakes he's made, it's about him creating a false sense of urgency that helped hyperinflate the bubble!

Stewart: I mean, that was kinda the point.

Boots: Do you want me to throw feces on him?

Stewart: No, Boots. That's OK. [...]

Dora: And Joe Scarborough is accusing you of being a cherry-picking ideologue? [...] Why is everyone being such a pendejo? [...] It means jackass in Spanish. [...]

Stewart: Hooray for the pendejos!

It's the inevitable consummation of this largely manufactured battle between a man who makes people laugh for a living and whatever people think I do. In a televised, two-part hatefuck that is, by all measure, bound to disappoint anyone that's been following it. Catch the fever!

Mr. Cramer, don't you destroy enough dough on your own show? Boom goes the dynamite! [Laughs.] How weird is our world when Jim Cramer's on TV baking pie and Martha Stewart is the one who went to jail for Securities fraud? That's weird.

CNBC sells itself as financial experts. And they have the access to the CEOs. And yet, they didn't catch any of this. And here they are blaming people who don't have the financial expertise and saying that they're part of the problem. [...] It seems like the banks and those that cheerlead them turned an arithmetic problem into a geometric one. They took a linear debt issue and by turning it into derivatives and securities and all that, now it's a gigantic problem. So, shouldn't we yell at them?

So, let me tell you why I think this thing has caught some attention. It's the gap between what CNBC advertises itself as and what it is. And the help that people need to discern this.

Look, we're both snake oil salesman to a certain extent, but we do label the show as snake oil here. Isn't there a problem selling snake oil as vitamin tonic?

I want the Jim Cramer on CNBC to protect me from that Jim Cramer.

When you talk about the regulators [going after market manipulation], why not the financial news networks? That's the whole point of this. CNBC could be an incredibly powerful tool of illumination for people that believe that there are two markets. One that has been sold to us as long-term: Put your money in 401Ks, put your money in pensions and just leave it there, don't worry about it, it's all doing fine. And then there's this other market, this real market that's occurring in a back room where giant piles of money are going in and out, and people are trading them, and it's transactional, and it's fast but it's dangerous, it's ethically dubious and it's hurting that long-term market. And so what it feels like—and I'm speaking purely as a layman—it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure by our pension, and our hard-earned—and that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on, but that you go on television as a financial network and pretend isn't happening.

I can't rationalize the brilliance and knowledge that you have about the intricacies of the market with the crazy bullshit I see you do each night.