Cramer vs. Blodget: Who cares?

Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam wants to know why so many people have been paying attention to the feud between “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer and banned Wall Street analyst turned Slate columnist Henry Blodget.

Beam wrote, “I can’t imagine that anyone does take Jim Cramer, the star of CNBC’s ‘Mad Money’ show, seriously. Why Blodget embarked on this mission mystifies me. I have no idea whether or not Cramer gives ‘bad investment advice,’ as Blodget alleges. But Cramer does give fantastic television. ‘Mad Money,’ is the ‘stickiest’ show in its time slot, meaning that whenever I surf across it, I can’t stop watching. It’s mesmerizing, as if someone had placed a webcam in one of the locked wards at McLean hospital. Thank God they break for commercials, so I can find an excuse to turn away.

“Cramer, wisely, has kept his powder dry. He trashed Blodget once on the ‘Imus in the Morning’ show, and sent me this to-the-point e-mail about responding to the Slate scribe: ‘Why bother? In my 25 years of trading he’s the only guy I know who has ever been banned from the business. If I have to respond to him then I guess I should respond to Ivan Boesky . . . If I were losing people money I would have lost my show a long time ago.’

“Who do I like in this tussle? Cramer, of course. I had my own mini-feud with the excitable, former Harvard Crimson president five years ago. I continue to treasure his e-mail message of Aug. 1, 2001, offering me $10,000 to come to New York and ‘try to beat the [deleted] out of me.'”

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