Last night’s appearance by (our own!) Jim Cramer wasn’t quite the major showdown it was built up to be. We should have known when Cramer tried to preemptively butter Stewart up on The Martha Stewart Show yesterday. Cramer showed up and meekly took much of Stewart’s criticism over the strategy of CNBC. He also was undone by a series of clips from a candid 2006 interview revealing a lot of the underhanded strategies that he and other hedge-fund managers used. “I understand you want to make finance entertaining, but it’s not a fucking game,” Stewart railed. “When I watch that, I can’t tell you how angry that makes me. What it says to me is that you all know. You all know what’s going on. You can draw a straight line from those shenanigans to the stuff that was going on at Bear Stearns and AIG and all this derivative market stuff that is this weird Wall Street side bet.” Cramer admitted to many mistakes (and even promised Stewart he would change his show), and pledged that his own “goal should always be to try to expose that there is no easy money.” “But there are literally shows called Fast Money!” Stewart shot back. “There’s a market for that,” Cramer tried to explain, but was interrupted by the Daily Show host. “There’s also a market for cocaine and hookers!”
