Jon Stewart wasn’t fair but he was on target

WASHINGTON — I was mesmerized by the most fascinating financial program recently.

Surprisingly, it was not on one of the business cable networks. It was on Comedy Central, where Jon Stewart took down the host of CNBC’s “Mad Money,” Jim Cramer.

If you haven’t seen the March 12 episode of “The Daily Show,” you should. You can watch the full face-off on www.thedailyshow.com or see this column on heraldnet.com.

A small, nationwide sampling of 448 self-reported Democrats, Republicans and independents said that by a landslide (74 percent), Stewart whupped Cramer pretty good. The study was conducted on March 13 by HCD Research, a communications research company headquartered in Flemington, N.J.

Stewart lashed out at Cramer with a vengeance that was both humorous and harsh. It was like watching a Mike Tyson fight in his boxing heyday. In those bouts, Tyson was so brutal you would wince in sympathy for his opponent, even while cheering Tyson on. I winced a lot during Stewart’s sparring with Cramer.

Since the showdown, much has been made of Stewart’s trouncing of Cramer. While entertaining, it wasn’t completely fair.

We all want to find someone to blame for the economic mudslide — and there are plenty I want to punch — but let’s not take the focus off the real scoundrels: mortgage lenders, people who lied to get a mortgage, and executives at AIG, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns. Although Stewart vocalized what we all have been feeling, his victim — Cramer — was a mere guppy in a tank of rotten fish.

“We’re both snake oil salesmen to a certain extent,” Stewart said to Cramer. “But we do label the show as snake oil here. Isn’t there a problem selling snake oil as vitamin tonic and saying that it cures impetigo?”

Cramer’s response: “I try really hard to make as many good calls as I can.”

There’s no question that Cramer, a former hedge fund manager, has been an unapologetic shrill for the stock market. But how could anyone watch his show on CNBC and not know this? If you were investing solely on the advice of what Cramer said, you were a fool.

Stewart played several video clips of Cramer appearing to advocate a certain type of trading to manipulate the stock market. What Stewart said after those clips had me high-fiving my husband for a good five minutes.

Investors were told, Stewart said, to “put your money in 401(k)s … and just leave it there,” Stewart said. “Don’t worry about it. It’s all doing fine. Then there’s this other market; this real market that’s occurring in the 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 hurts that long-term market. So what it feels like to us — and I’m speaking purely as a layman — it feels like we are capitalizing your adventure … and that it is a game that you know, that you know is going on.”

Cramer took the blows for a lot of people who did a poor job of warning average investors about market risk. But as Stewart said during the interview, this isn’t about Cramer.

Stewart’s tirade was enjoyable. But what can you learn from what he pulled out of Cramer?

Here are at least two rules individual investors should learn from Cramer’s beatdown:

Don’t invest money you need in the short term regardless of how bad or good the market is doing. I received a question from a reader who was desperate to know what he could do about his tax bill. This person had put money set aside for his taxes in AAA-rated companies last fall, thinking his investment would be safe. It wasn’t. He lost it all.

What could I say to this reader? There’s nothing he can do but work out a payment plan with the Internal Revenue Service.

Don’t dismiss the risk of investing, especially if you’re mired in debt. Many of the people I hear from took the advice of folks, often financial advisers, who suggested they invest money that they could have and should have used to pay down a heavy amount of debt such as student loans, or even large car loans. They were persuaded to hold on to the debt on the assumption they were almost guaranteed a bigger return by investing.

How did that work out for them?

Some don’t have jobs now. They don’t have much, if any, cash, their investment portfolios are decimated, and they still have the debt to pay.

They erred in only looking at the upside of the stock market and not factoring in risk.

Stewart’s pummeling of Cramer was funny. But when you stop laughing, get serious about learning the right way to invest because there is no easy money. As Cramer conceded: “The market was going up for a long time and our real sin, I think, was to believe it could continue to go up a lot.”