Categories: OLD Media Moves

Blodget wonders if Cramer's career is crippled

Disgraced former Wall Street analyst Henry Blodget writes that “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer may have hurt his media career by saying on a recent video that he manipulated stocks while he was managing a hedge fund and that investors used business journalists to influence stock prices.

Blodget, who has been feuding with Cramer recently, wrote, “Cramer is implicitly undermining everything he says on his CNBC show. The whole conceit of Mad Money is that small investors can compete with the Big Boys of Wall Street. Well, if this is really the way the Big Boys play the trading game, how can that possibly be true? Is Cramer just implying (but not saying) on Mad Money that small investors should break laws?

“Third, Cramer is putting his employers (and regulators) in a bind. Yes, Cramer is a ratings and readership machine. TheStreet.com is a public company, however, and it presumably does not want to become embroiled in a controversy about whether its advice crosses the line. CNBC, meanwhile, is a subsidiary of GE, a company with a well-deserved global reputation for integrity, fairness, and quality. Leaving aside the insult that Cramer lobbed at ‘the Pisanis of the world,’ can CNBC really say nothing when one of its most visible employees urges investors to use the network to engage in behavior that is questionable to say the least?

“Lastly, there is the tar that Cramer dumped all over his former firm and the entire hedge-fund industry. Did Cramer’s former clients—such as Eliot Spitzer, former attorney general and now governor of New York, who made his name excoriating Wall Street practices (and me)—know that Cramer was engaging in these practices to boost returns? If so, what did they think of this? What does Gov. Spitzer think of it now? Cramer loves to boast about his hedge-fund record. At the very least, we now know where some of it came from.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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