Lunch with Jim Cramer

Chrystia Freeland, the U.S. managing editor of The Financial Times, writes Saturday about having lunch with CNBC “Mad Money” host Jim Cramer.

Freeland wrote, “Even if you buy Cramer’s shtick about his tortured relationship with himself — and this Woody Allen-esque self-loathing is certainly an essential foil to his show’s other excesses and part of what makes it so watchable — it isn’t the whole story. For one thing, he is unambivalently proud to have succeeded as a journalist, a career that seems to have more value for him than his previous incarnation as a hedge fund manager.

“‘I like what I do,’ Cramer says, for a moment sounding absolutely earnest and unconflicted. ”I had done the hedge fund thing. It was fine, but I always wanted to be a journalist. And I think this is more fun for me now. Everybody’s a hedge fund manager. There’s not a lot of guys with their own TV shows.’

“Part of what motivated Cramer’s move is his conviction that his combination of Wall Street pedigree and Animal House slap-stick is the best way to bring the markets — and all the riches he believes they can deliver — to the ordinary guy. Cramer occasionally comes across as the Street’s raucous spokesman, as he did in his infamous and, it turns out rather prescient, summertime rant when he called on the Fed to wake up and start cutting rates.”

Read more here.