Thomas Clarke, who has been CEO of financial news website The Street has announced his departure “effective immediately.”
Clarke’s abrupt departure comes less than a day after The Daily Show aired tape of The Street’s co-founder, Jim Cramer, explaining in a Street.com webcast how he, as a hedge fund manager, manipulated value to serve some publicly traded companies and investors at the expense of others.
If you have just crawled out from under a rock, Cramer was a guest on Jon Stewart’s show last night, and the general consensus is Stewart took Cramer, CNBC, and financial “journalism,” in general, to the cleaners.
Or, maybe you haven’t just crawled out from under a rock—maybe you have only been getting your news from MSNBC. The 24-hour news channel—and CNBC partner—was reportedly told by its corporate bosses that this was, you know, not of interest to its viewers:
A TVNewser tipster tells us MSNBC producers were asked not to incorporate the Jim Cramer/Jon Stewart interview into their shows today. In fact, the only time it came up on MSNBC was during the White House briefing, when a member of the press corps asked Press Secretary Robert Gibbs if Pres. Obama watched. Gibbs wasn’t sure if the president had, but Gibbs did. "I enjoyed it thoroughly," the Press Secretary said.
Cramer will apparently talk about his Daily Show performance on his Friday show (6pm Eastern); no word yet on what MSNBC shows like Hardball, Countdown, and The Rachel Maddow Show will do.
A search of CNBC’s website this afternoon showed only AP and Reuters wire copy on the Stewart-Cramer interview/battle-of-the-century—no original reporting. But, then, why should today be any different for CNBC?
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Could the Feds indict Cramer?
how convienent
I wonder if Cuomo is sniffing around TheStreet.com. Very odd that CEO Clarke would leave the day after that damning interview with Cramer aired, the one where he essentially told how he manipulated the market to benefit his hedge fund. Then tried to make Jon Stewart believe it was a hypothetical.
I think the MSNBC people ought to all just say “We’d tell you about Cramer vs Stewart, but our corporate supervisors have insisted we not do so. You’ll have to catch that story on the internet.”
And then just run a crawl underneath as to who’s carrying it.
I think maybe, Cramer may have legal problems, because of what he said during the interview with the guy regarding the SEC and what he was doing about propagating the markets regarding Apple and the other companies and their phones.
It had to take a satire show to ask the hard journalist questions, that is a slap in their face! Cramer’s body language was very tense and he seemed intimidated by Steward. Cramer was unable to remove his guilt during the conversation, because Steward kept reminding Cramer its not about him! Oh how wrong Steward is…Cramer is a fraction of the bigger issue at hand. Cramer just fed the propaganda to CNBC’s audience that the large corporations wanted him to project.
In Stewards closing, he mentioned his mother and how conservative her money ways are regarding investing in the markets, so I think all of Stewards anger came from what his mother lost because of the media’s propaganda.
Just like everything else the past administration did, this is just one more area in which they sent American’s down a river with out a …. (ethical or moral creed)
Don’t ask what you can do for your Country, ask what is your Country is doing for the Corporate CEO!
Stewart really pulled the trigger with that footage. Wow, was he prepared.
Yeah, this is really a test of integrity for the hard news shows, esp. a newbie like Rachel Maddow. I am hopeful she’ll come through, but we’ll see.
I’m not sure I’m connecting on the dots here…is Thomas Clarke leaving of his own accord because the ship is going down?
That says it all, and shows the depth of our problem as a nation. Inasmuch as the corporations run our government (with their money), then this is censorship, regardless of the fact that it looks like a corporate marketing decision.
The Corporations have taken over this nation. They have CERTAINLY taken over its media. How long til the Right Wing Smear machine focuses on Jon Stewart for a big game of Character Assassination?
I love Robert Gibbs. I could kiss him some days. ;-)
excellent reporting Greg Levine !!!
isn’t the manipulation the way cramer spoke illegal, didn’t he admit guilt, didn’t he not deny that guilt, and why isn’t he indicted for it
yet you hear the wing nutz talk about msnbc being SOOOO liberal
Cramer is just the tip of the iceberg. Be sure to check out deepcapture.com. These guys ”allegedly” were manipulating markets and naked short selling. Jon was right about them gaming with our 401Ks
ain’t that the truth!
I’ll bet a lot of pups are gonna be glued to M$NBC tonight.
When can Mr. Cramer expect a call from the USA in Manhattan, to help him or her with their inquiries?
Brokerage firms like Socktrade are where suckers like us keep our margin accounts holding stocks and cash. We are prohibited from selling short any stock with a share price under $5.
Big houses like Goldman or anyone using a direct trading platform can short any stock no matter the price.
No brokerage houses have been securing stocks for short selling. They are supposed to locate and set aside any stocks for shorting so that the number of shares traded never exceeds the actual number of any company’s publicly traded shares. But they don’t. This creates the situation that is naked short selling.
Naked short selling by Goldman and others has been driving the market down. There are no penalties for naked short selling.
CNN had coverage of Brawl Street right away this a.m.
So, since they’re such admirers of Stewart, maybe he should do the questioning of Chee-knee when the veep-not-yet-in-prison is interviewed for State of the Union.
If their viewership goes up, do you think they should send a tiny check to Gregg via FDL?
I’m not knowledgeable enough to know (heh) but wasn’t sort selling part of the meltdown?
Cramer’s up. Bout to ’splain it all away.
Looks like he’s fighting tears.
Puts on a clip with him & MARTHA Stewart.
New post—>
Can’t figure out what he’s talking about. Certainly not about last night.
thanks for the liveblogging, i’ve been curious to know how tds appearance would be handled
!!
thanks eCahn. I’m watching msnbc now…so can’t watch Cramer trying to rehab.
sooooooooo sad when the jig is up
I haven’t made it to the tube yet. Is Cramboy owning up to last night, or is he totally blowing it off? And I’m assuming he’s still doing that stupid “sleeves rolled up”, “I’m hard at work for the little guy”, Sideshow Bob look, right?
Just flipped it on. Cramboy is doing his same schtick as if nothing had happened last night, as if nothing had changed. And maybe it hasn’t. We’ll have to wait to see what Cuomo does… That should get his (and GE’s) attention.
What a pity that last night’s “Must-See TV” wasn’t on any NBC network.
Keep in the back of your mind that GE owns NBC because Karl Rove sold “Neutron Jack” Welch on having a media mouth piece to promote tax legislation to the benefit of GE.
From the beginning it was really about benefits to GE’s bottom line and not in terms of profit — and most definitely not about “Must-See TV.”
The meme Cramer and his buds keep pushing is that nobody knew this was coming.
Not only did folks like Roubini, Krugman, Atrios, Tanta, et al know and say it was coming (how many years now has Atrios talked about Big Shitpile?), but so did Bernanke and company — in fact, as Krugman explained today on his blog, they were trying to prepare for it at the Fed by gaming out all the possible scenarios therefor.
Yup. Big Money knew about it…George Soros was so worried about it last spring that he bypassed standard publishing processes and self-published a book on the internet, a free download, and went to numerous media outlets to try to explain what was going on.
I sat in on a conf. call hosted by Steve Clemons; Soros said at that point he expected 5 million foreclosures over a 2-year window.
He elaborated further in an interview with Judy Woodruff on Bloomberg TV the next day, republished as a transcript in New York Review of Books 15-MAY-08 edition. Soros said:
Woodruff:
Soros:
In the same interview, Soros called out a figure would up in credit default swaps — $45 trillion.
They knew it was coming, and if they didn’t they should have been fired.
From what I can gather, it’s more complex than that.
Corporations have outgrown national laws; really, can you restrain Godzilla with sewing thread? Not likely.
But from that point, it seems to be something of a rock > scissors > paper dynamic. Corporations control governments, which make laws that control accounting rules and market rules, which then — in the hands of manipulators like Cramer — are manipulated in order to take down some perfectly good companies.
Corporations answer only to their shareholders, which has obviously become a huge, unmanageable problem.
But they can be destroyed by stock manipulation and corrupt trade practices.
Not sure how this will all play out but nice to see Stewart call bullshit.
That assumes they work for us, or for our benefit. They don’t.
Anything said to the contrary is just the farmers keeping the animals calm so they produce more.
Between the size of the numbers, the fact that evidently the Fed is still using Mark-to-Market (which I associate with Enron), the fact that I’ve still yet to hear a good explanation of the funkiness of Navier-Stokes equations and the phase-change issues they represent, and the offshore banking that has to play into all this, I think no one has figured out how to describe that we’re in really, really deep sh*t.
One of the many things that I admire about Soros (apart from the fact that he values trying to accurately discern reality) is his sense of how flawed we humans are — and Cramer is a superb example of Soros’s ‘Theory of Reflexivity’ in action: we see what we see based on what we believe we will see, which is shaped by what we’re told and the social cues we are given.
They do work for some of us. They just figured they got their cut first off whatever they made for those of us with invested capital.
The difficulty for most of us who do have investments is that we must rely on regulatory bodies to do what we cannot do ourselves, in addition to internal and external auditors.
None of them did what they were supposed to do; there’s no way that the auditors did their job properly if AIG was so badly under-reserved, and the government especially the SEC and DOJ did not do their jobs at all. Those of us with investments pay for the auditors — who stiffed us. ALL of us pay for the SEC and DOJ — and they stiffed us ALL.
Great post, thanks Gregg.
digg is open.
Dr. Maddow did address the Stewart/Cramer smackdown on her Friday show and she wasn’t shy about saying things that CNBC might find cringe-inducing. After pointing out how the widespread interest in this interview reflects public anger over the lack of journalistic oversight vis-a-vis the business world, she paired this event with WashPo’s very quiet announcement that it is dropping its daily business section. Ouch.