Stewart’s humiliation of Cramer marks end of era

The humiliation of Jim Cramer may, finally, have driven a stake through the heart of Wall Street's era of 'irrational exuberance'. He has never been the sort of multi-million-dollar-bonus man of corporate Wall Street now at the heart of America's rage, but he has always personified the adrenalin-pumping, hyper-aggressive exuberance which has laid the money markets to waste.

With a bald head shining in testimony to his testosterone level, his sleeves rolled up to his biceps and the rat-a-tat delivery of a fairground barker, Cramer made it his business to become the public face of a Wall Street era.

He is the caricature trader of 'greed is good', the type captured by Michael Douglas in the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street and, even better, by Tom Wolfe's defining New York novel The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Boasting that he is a "banking class hero", his schtick is to combine financial journalism with financial shenanigans. To the markets, Cramer is the one-of-us who for years has written the Wall Street column for New York magazine, set up his own web journal, theStreet.com, and dominated the financial cable channel CNBC with his show Mad Money.

To the punter, he is - or rather has been - the analyst/tipster who knows what he is talking about because he is the Real Thing. He claims to be worth $400m himself, from his own trades and his own hedge fund. His books, with titles like Stay Mad for Life: Get Rich, Stay Rich (Make Your Kids Even Richer), make the bestseller lists.

However, it now turns out that what Cramer has really been is "a shill", a man pitching a product, the cardinal sin of the supposedly objective journalist. That was the charge from Jon Stewart, the Daily Show comedian who, since Dubya Bush went to war on false pretences, has become the unlikely peoples' commissar for truth in media and politics.

In repeated on-air attacks over the last two weeks, Stewart has exposed his fellow television star as a self-interested, compromised journalist who has for years helped his Wall Street colleagues rip-off the pensions funds and savings accounts of honest folks, "selling snake oil for tonic".

The pair of them have created a bare-knuckle side-show that is profoundly revealing. Stewart's Daily Show ratings have spiked yet again. Cramer, he charged, was no more than a "hyperbolic example" of a financial journalist who creates an "unreal market" for public consumption while Wall Street plays the "real market" in back rooms. "We," Stewart told Cramer, "are capitalising your adventures."

Nobody messes with trading-pit bull Cramer, and his initial reaction was furious. The men agreed to go mano-a-mano, so on March 11 Cramer went along to Stewart's Comedy Central studio. That was his big mistake.

When he denied shrilling for Bear Stearns stock just before it went belly-up, Stewart played the Mad Money tapes of him doing just that. When Cramer denied boosting Wachovia Bank just before it collapsed, Stewart played the tape of him doing that too. But things got really rough when Stewart laid charges that Cramer had openly recommended spreading false information to manipulate markets in order to make a quick buck selling 'short'.

For a moment it looked as if Cramer, leaning across the studio desk, would butt Stewart with his shining dome. But Stewart had incontrovertible evidence: this time the tape came not from CNBC, but from Cramer's own theStreet.com webcast.

"I would encourage anyone with a hedge fund to do it," Cramer barks. It is a quick way to make money, very satisfying. "I'm not going to say it on TV," adds Cramer, with a smirk. Confronted by Stewart with this, Cramer watched himself on tape, and for once was lost for words. "It's on TV now," was all he could come up with. Stewart had landed the knock-out blow.

Born to a Jewish family in a professional-class suburb of Philadelphia in 1945, he edited the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of the elite Ivy League university, and then took on a series of lowly jobs in journalism but his career as a reporter didn't really work out, and he moved to Greenwich Village in New York to take a law degree.

He passed the exams, but was turned down for a job as a public prosecutor by none other than Rudy Giuliani, then the US Attorney. That is when Cramer became a stockbroker, joining Goldman Sachs in 1984, and he thrived. By 1987, he was successful enough to start Cramer and Co, his own hedge fund.

The last 20 years would not have been the same in New York without Jim Cramer, exuberant face of an exuberant Wall Street era. Cramer still has his TV show - for now. But the influence has gone.

In a way, it's sad to see him fall: nevertheless, just like the era, he deserves his comeuppance. ·