Jon And Jim

Jon Stewart had his feud-mate Jim Cramer on The Daily Show last night. I didn't expect much, but it was considerably worse than I thought it would be.

Stewart ambushed Cramer with old footage and a welter of (weak) arguments, while Cramer was more apologetic than anything else.

Since Cramer (perhaps intimidated on foreign soil) barely offered any explanation for his actions, I won't go into whatever arguments he allegedly made.

Meanwhile, Jon Stewart was amazingly self-righteous, at one point stating "I understand that you want to make finance entertaining, but it's not a (bleeped out) game." You know what else isn't a bleeping game? The news. So what does that make Jon Stewart?

Most of Stewart's arguments were the demagoguery I expect from a politician, not someone who makes jokes at the expense of politicians. (And some wondered if that was the real problem with Cramer--not that he was wrong about Bear Stearns, but that he, and Rick Santelli, turned on Obama, and ranted as his expense.)

Stewart seemed to think everyone saw the problem coming and should have warned us, and that the money people knew they were doing damage to all of us in the long run and just didn't care.

1) At any given time there are many looming disasters. Most of them never become as bad as they could be, and if we spent all our time trying to stamp every one out before it got dangerous, we'd be doing nothing else.

2) We stop lots of potential problems from getting too big. For all we know, there are thousands of catastrophes that could have happened but, due to our foresight, never occurred. The trouble is a) you don't get credit for things that don't happen--though they're just as important as things that do--and b) no matter how many fires you put out, sooner or later one's gonna get by you.

3) By the time a problem is big enough and clear enough that you can see something must be done, it's still quite hard to stop. Perhaps we were right (if a bit late) to take action against the threat of the Saddam Hussein regime in Iraq. But not only will we never know how much better off we are because we went in, but every bad thing that happened because of the war will be blamed on its supporters. Imagine if the Fed changed their outlook a few years ago to help solve the problems we face today, then serious economic dislocations occurred, and the markets dropped 20%. Everyone, including Jon Stewart, I bet, would be screaming bloody murder.

4) It's not much of an argument to claim that money people (as if it were only the money people) were just looking at short-term consequences and ignored the big picture. They did what they thought was best and I doubt they imagined it would cause all this trouble--in fact, I bet they thought they were planning for the long run. It's possible the steps we're taking now to stop our current crisis will be disastrous in the years to come, but the people who propose them aren't saying they don't care, they're saying it's worth taking the chance. Will Stewart condemn them if they're wrong? Heck, let's say you only plan for the long run. You'll likely make just as many mistakes as planning for the short run--maybe more, since no one really knows what the future holds.