Yesterday Wallstreet went into major meltdown … today the Fed put $70 billion into the U.S. financial system to help relieve credit pressure, and the BBC reports that European markets are in a slide, feeling the weight of Wall Street’s own slide.
Jim Cramer of Mad Money made an almost prophetic prediction over a year ago … I’m not a hardcore Wallstreet guy, and I’ll be the first to admit that he sounds like a loon – but it’s pretty wild to see him flip out, call people out, and describe pretty closely what happened yesterday a year ahead of time.
(I know this is a little unusual to see on Applegeeks, but I’m kind of a news freak and yesterday was big news … !)
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 16th, 2008 at 12:07 PM and is filed under Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Jim Cramer knows his shit. A good friend of mine watches him religiously and said he has called all the big market stuff (can you tell I have no idea how to use economical jargon?).
All I know about him personally was that he rose Bluth from Sell to Don’t Buy.
Macroeconomics, i believe it’s called =]
THATZ THE ONE
Nice Arrested Development reference.
Wall Street’s going to end up on e-Bay…not sure if anyone is left with any $$$ to buy it…
The Arabs and the Chinese, maybe?
it’s a fuckin pain in the ass to have equity fund’s as form of saving. all you can do these day’s is hoping that the stock market will rcover some day.
*mumbles*
Any moron with eyes could have told you a friggin year ago that we’d have colossal financial implosions resulting from the subprime mortgage and collateralized debt! Every political blog I read was talking about this for far longer than that. If you want to know the future, read Atrios – he is a former economist and was sounding the alarm about subprime at least three to four years ago, probably more (I’m having trouble searching his archives to try to find the earliest reference to the subject). Of course as a DFH (Dirty Fucking Hippie) no “serious” people would listen to anything somebody like him said – we had the magic capitalism fairies pooping fat sacks of cash, who wants to listen to dour old liberal bloggers?
i watch Cramer every single freaking night “THEY KNOW NOTHING” and it’s true. the end is neigh.
Dude, don’t apologize. Part of why we read these posts is because of yours and Hawk’s insights into the world, be it movie posters of utter badassness or amusing annecdotes about how your father scaled the outside of a building when you were a kid. This is cool stuff.
If you have a powerstache, you too can take on the economy!!!!
This is really nothing new fellas. The banking industry was falling apart a decade ago… but back then… “Oh don’t worry about a thing, we’ve got all kinds of money to finance your ventures (bull shit)! just sign here…”
Sure, your money in the bank is FDIC insured, right? No big deal. The FDIC says they can insure $4.2T in assets… the hell they can! How in the *hell* can you ensure that the $4.2T that you guarantee is safe when you’ve only got $52B to do it with?! To spell it out in pretty easy to deal with terms…
For every $100 you have in the bank, if everything collapses right now (which really isn’t too far away), and the FDIC pays out equally (which you know wont happen) up to that $4.2T marker… $1.00 is all you’ll ever get. let us all remember, America has well over $4.2T in the banks right now, so a lot of you folks, aint getting SQUAT.
what happend yesterday?
Lets see… Lehman Brothers is in bankruptcy, employes out a job. Merrill Lynch was in such trouble that over the weekend they quickly merged (were bought out by) Bank of America. Even more investment banks are in serious trouble. Stock markets around the globe to some serious hits. [jest]And I was leaning to eat with just my fingers, instead of forks… getting ready of the revolution :) .[/jest]
Be very careful what you say about Cramer. He is by no means a prophet of any kind. He just happens to be blessed by 20/20 hindsight and the amazing ability to overlook his mistakes. If you Google “Jim Cramer” and “Bear Stearns” you will see him for the enormous pompous jerk that he is (And he has yet to apologize for that disaster). Furthermore, that video you posted occurred well after the market had begun its slide from the sub-prime mortgage fiasco. A monkey could have figured out the economy was in trouble with all the news coverage it was getting. No prophecy needed there.
P.S. For those who were not familiar with the market when that clip took place, Cramer was partly responsible for the meltdown that he so vehemently rants about. A couple weeks prior he had reassured his viewers that Bear Stearns was fine and told them to keep their money in the firm. Fast foward and Bear Stears goes under, taking their investors, clients, and public confidence in the U.S. economy with it.
Jim “the madman lunatic” Cramer? A year ago? please, the guys at mises.org have been saying ‘look out!’ since Greenspan slashed interest rates in 2001.
Lehman Brothers is currently trading at .12 cents a share while AIG which has also been bailed out by the Federal Government will open up tomorrow at 2.01 dollars a share, I believe.
Does anyone else see this as an opportunity to jump onto a train regularly traveling at a steady 50-65+ dollars?
I do believe Cramer was correct in believing Bear Sterns was fine a couple of weeks prior to them going under. Remember, any insider information he knows or talks to people on Wall Street about, or any investments he makes himself he cannot disclose to viewers. So, since he can’t pull out of Bear Sterns, or put money in Bear Sterns… most of what he says he believes. Now I’m not saying he’s right all the time, or even most of the time….. but that’s not something he should be apologizing for. He didn’t start a Bear Sterns meltdown, are you kidding me? If anything he stalled it by making sure people DIDN’T pull out. If people started pulling out of Sterns at that time, it would have gone down right then and there.
tl;dr Cramer wasn’t at all responsible for the meltdown, but surely didn’t see that Bear Sterns would fall so hard so fast. However, after the crash and doing research, he did wisen up (since he does have smart friends) and made such a prediction.
Cramer is a tit. He said something a year ago and it was right today: that’s about as close to right as he tends to get. Remember, always remember this: Cramer is not in finance, he is in entertainment. He runs through far too many stocks in way too short a time for anyone with half a brain to believe they’re getting the sort of comprehensive information required for sensible investing. He’s emblematic of the problem: making rain with Other People’s Money; fleecing rubes by pretending CDOs are A-rated and running off with the fees; giving main street layoffs the finger right before screaming for bailouts for Wall Street (which this thoroughly embarassing clip was doing).
He was formative w.r.t thestreet.com, and that was cool but that was then. He didn’t sell out, he blew out. Ignore him.
Above all else, go look up “moral hazard”.
The trouble with Wall Street is too many finance degrees at the expense of economics degrees: we’re taught what risk is, not just the scams for short-term investing.
If you can’t spot the sucker in the room, it’s you. And American taxpayer, it’s you.